


a formula for the fall of things

by language_escapes



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, Reverse Reichenbach, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:49:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 122,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25059535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/language_escapes/pseuds/language_escapes
Summary: When Moriarty finally goes to prison and requests that Joan visit her in exchange for information, Joan knows she can’t say no. A simple game between rivals becomes more than expected, and Joan finds her life on the line.
Comments: 34
Kudos: 52





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have been writing this fic since 2013. Since a few days after the Elementary season one finale, in fact. This is my magnum opus, and now it is finally done. 
> 
> This is canon compliant through the first half of the second season but diverges from there. 
> 
> Some general warnings: mental health issues, canon-typical violence, canon-typical ableism, mentions of suicidal ideation. 
> 
> A huge thank you to my beta and cheerleader for the past eight years, sanguinity. This fic would not exist without her constant encouragement and reassurance that yes, it was still worth reading (especially after Elementary ended). She also LITERALLY taught me math for this. I still have the pages upon pages of math problems that I did, under her tutelage.
> 
> Despite the wait, I hope you find this fic enjoyable.

Moriarty is convicted on a Tuesday.

Joan is at home. She is sitting on her bed, trying to figure out if she wants to paint her toenails red or purple, her toes already separated with the foam, when her phone rings. She reaches over without thinking, glances at the screen, and answers. “Hey, Alfredo,” she says. “Red or purple?”

“Joan,” he says, and he sounds deadly serious. She straightens instantly and swings her feet to the floor, heading for the television room.

“Which channel?” she asks, walking swiftly up the stairs. She doesn’t doubt that the footage will still be playing, no matter how long ago the conviction came through.

“All of them,” he says. He sounds distracted. She doesn’t blame him. 

After Moriarty nearly killed Agent Mattoo and slipped the rest of her handlers, the FBI and Scotland Yard conceded that perhaps their greatest asset was also their greatest danger. Rather than keep her as their personal consultant on international crime, they turned her over to the courts. Since then, the trial has been their lives. Sherlock testified. Joan testified. Even in the weeks and sometimes months when they didn’t have to put on their court clothes, they still had the shadow of Moriarty hanging over them. Joan wants to be done with all of it. She wants Moriarty behind bars.

Of course, she knows it isn’t as simple as that. Moriarty, as Sherlock has pointed out several times, could have probably walked out of the prison at any time if she wanted. As Joan pointed out, Moriarty allowed herself to be taken back into custody after killing Kayden’s kidnappers. Which means, in both Joan’s and Sherlock’s eyes, that Moriarty does not want to be free, which means she has a plan. A woman like Moriarty does not allow herself to stay beaten unless that’s what she wants. Joan has a feeling that the end of the trial is just the end of the trial, and not the end of the quiet war they’ve been waging with her for over two years.

She switches on one television. Just the one, not all seven. She watches for twenty minutes, Alfredo’s breathing a reassuring static in her right ear.

Moriarty, Jamie, a presumed alias. Found guilty for one count of solicitation to commit murder in the first degree, not guilty for the other crimes she was being charged with. Not even the murder of the men who kidnapped Kayden. She had a good lawyer. Twenty-five years to life.

The camera switches over to Moriarty. She looks at the camera dead-on and just tilts her chin up, the amused, enigmatic smile that has become her hallmark during the course of the trial sliding across her face. The tabloids had loved that smile.

Joan swallows, gripping the phone tightly. She doesn’t know if Moriarty is staring down the camera for her or for Sherlock, but either way, she knows it’s for one of them.

“Damn,” Alfredo says. “I hate that smile. That’s her ‘I know when the world is going to burn’ smile.”

Alfredo has a fondness for poetry, but Joan is much more pragmatic when it comes to Moriarty. She has to be. “It’s her scheming smile,” she says. “It means this is just beginning.”

“Gonna have to trust you on that. You and Sherlock gonna be okay?”

Joan nods to herself, switching the television off. “I’ll be fine. I don’t know about Sherlock. I think he’s out shopping with Ms. Hudson.” Her hands are tingling. She rubs them swiftly against her legs, trying to shake the numb shock off. It’s not the best conviction, not the one they hoped for, but she and Sherlock knew that most of the charges would never stick. There just wasn’t enough evidence, or there were enough people willing to fall on their swords for her. She knew to expect this.

“Great, more weird clothes for everyone.”

“Hey, you liked the nose warmer.”

They fall into silence. Joan can hear the muted, distant sounds of the television at Alfredo’s apartment through the phone. She’s still staring at the black screen. “I should go,” she says finally. “When Sherlock gets home…”

“Yeah,” he says. “Hey, Joan?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not your sponsor or anything, but I am your friend. You need to talk, I’m here.”

She smiles, the slightest twist of her lips. “Thanks, Alfredo. I’ll keep that in mind. Talk to you later.”

She hits the end button and lets out a long, slow breath. Then she heads back downstairs to her room.

The red nail polish, she decides. For war.

******  
“This isn’t the end of it,” Sherlock says that night, over a bowl of chili.

Joan wiggles her freshly painted toes. “I know,” she says.

******  
When the call comes, neither of them are surprised.

Moriarty is sent to Newgate Prison, and for three weeks, they don’t hear a thing from her. Sherlock dismisses it with a careless wave of his hand, but she can see the tension in his neck and jaw. He’s waiting for the phone call like people wait for an execution.

Joan and Gregson talk, and their workload increases. They assist the police with two murders, a kidnapping, and a trafficking ring. 

Three days after they manage to find enough evidence to bring in Jethro Rucastle, the leader of the trafficking ring, Joan gets a call.

“The Captain wants you down here,” Marcus says, and he sounds agitated.

“Moriarty?” she asks, and leans against the hallway wall. She was on her way down to have breakfast. She was thinking of making French toast. It would have been a change.

“Yeah. You and Holmes. As soon as you can.”

“Okay, Marcus. Thanks,” she says, and then goes downstairs.

“Watson, good morning!” Sherlock says when she walks down into the kitchen. He turns and beams at her, one of his best smiles, the ones that light up his entire face. He’s making bacon. Joan hates to take that away, hates the ruin the entire day when he was clearly in a good mood.

But then, she had been thinking of making French toast, and that’s ruined now, so she supposes at least he won’t be alone.

“Marcus called,” she says, sitting down at the table. Sherlock’s hands hesitate for just a brief second over the pan of bacon, but then he slides the slices onto a plate and puts it in front of her, making a gesture that she should eat. She picks up a piece and bites it. She generally doesn’t eat it a lot, but Sherlock makes really good bacon, and she can never resist. “Captain Gregson has requested that we head over to the precinct as soon as we can.”

“Ah,” Sherlock says, and puts bacon on his own plate, walking over to join her. Joan sighs and stands up, walking over to turn the oven off before sitting back down.

“Yeah,” she agrees, and eats another slice of bacon.

“The sword of Damocles has finally fallen, then.”

She really doesn’t have anything to say to that. She nods and eats some more bacon. 

Joan sits next to Sherlock on the subway, and neither of them say a word. She tries to figure out what to tell him, tries to figure out what to tell herself, but comes up blank. All of her time as a sober companion didn’t really prepare her for what to do when a criminal mastermind demands your friend’s presence. 

She walks on his right when they walk up the stairs, and she stays by his side when they walk into Gregson’s office and sit down. She doesn’t quite touch him, doesn’t quite reach out, but she does lean in and keep herself within his peripheral vision at all times. It’s the best she can do. She tries to ignore his clenched fists. She pretends that she isn’t digging her nails into her palms.

Gregson is waiting for them, sitting behind his desk, looking gray and drawn. Joan blinks. He has never looked old before, not to her. 

He does today.

“Glad you could make it,” Gregson says, waving them to their seats.

“Of course, Captain,” Sherlock says stiffly, giving him a thin lipped smile. “What can we do for you?”

Gregson gives Sherlock an unamused look. They all know why they’re there. “Moriarty made a request,” he says.

Sherlock takes a slow breath, rolling his shoulders back and nodding. He looks like he’s expecting an actual sword to slice through his neck. Joan scoots her hand over until her pinkie is resting against the edge of Sherlock’s hand. It’s the only support she can give him right now. She can’t stop Moriarty from messing with him, but she can at least be there for him, be ready for the fallout.

The sword doesn’t fall. At least, not on him. Gregson reaches up and rubs his eyes, knocking his glasses up on his forehead. “She wants to see you,” he says, and as Sherlock licks his lips to respond, he says, “Not you. You.”

He’s looking at Joan.

******  
The ride home on the subway is similarly subdued, but instead of Joan watching Sherlock, she can feel him watching her. His leg is bouncing up and down, and he keeps accidentally knocking into people. They get glared at a lot on the way home. That part, at least, is fairly routine.

When they get home, Joan goes straight upstairs. She turns on the shower and then goes to find a new towel. Hers smells funny, and Sherlock has been finding stranger and stranger experiments since Moriarty went to prison. She might just be paranoid, but given what happened to her toothbrush, she feels she has right to be.

She stays in the shower for almost thirty minutes, longer than she usually takes. She just stands under the spray, letting the water fall on her face. She doesn’t know how she feels about any of this. 

They always expected Moriarty to call. They discussed it, at length, the day the verdict came back. But they both assumed that Moriarty would call for Sherlock. It made sense. Sherlock is the piece of art, the one Moriarty knows, the one she enjoys torturing. He’s the one she called for after she killed Kayden’s kidnappers. Joan is… the mascot. Only important in relation to Sherlock. Even when Moriarty was still Irene, they didn’t spend a lot of time together alone. Some, but not much.

It was probably dumb, thinking that Moriarty would continue to have no interest in her. She saw the creepy painting. Even if Moriarty only cares about how she relates to Sherlock, she’s still interesting, still a bit of a puzzle. Joan has never considered herself difficult to understand, but murderers who lack empathy apparently do.

When she’s done with her shower, she dresses and goes to her bedroom. She just wants to read and get some sleep. She can worry about Moriarty tomorrow.

She’s been reading for almost an hour when Sherlock appears in her doorway. He doesn’t step over the threshold, hovering awkwardly just beyond the invisible line, the toes of his shoes right on the edge. During a case, he’ll walk in without thought or concern. Sometimes he’ll do it if he wants her to come and watch Saturday morning cartoons with him, though that happens much less regularly. Any other time, though, he waits.

If she lives to be one hundred, she doesn’t think she’ll ever figure out where Sherlock lays down his arbitrary lines.

“You don’t have to go,” he says.

Joan sighs and puts her book down on her comforter. She really did want to wait to have this conversation, but Sherlock has problems with patience. If they don’t talk now, she’ll have to try to sleep with him sitting in his chair, watching her. Which is always so conducive to a good night’s rest. “Come in, Sherlock.”

He hesitates for just a moment, and then slides through the door. He’s looking everywhere but her, his eyes locking on her fireplace, her book, her chair-nightstand that she’s never bothered to replace, her lamp, her ceiling, her window frame, and then finally on the floor. There isn’t much to look at in her room. She’s never bothered filling it up. “You owe her nothing. It is not a requirement that you visit her in prison.”

“We knew the call would come,” Joan points out, leveraging herself up. She folds her arms over her stomach, watching Sherlock fidget uneasily.

“Yes, but. That doesn’t mean you are obligated to go.”

Joan takes off her glasses, putting them on top of her book so that she can see Sherlock a little more clearly. He’s pale, and his cheekbones are sticking out a bit more than usual. There are dark circles underneath his eyes, and his hands are skittering across his corduroy pants as if they’re going to grow wings and take flight.

“Would you go?”

Sherlock jerks as if she hit him. Joan keeps her gaze steady, watching his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows.

“Watson, she did not… request my presence. As such, it is rather a moot point, don’t you think?”

Joan doesn’t blink. “Would you go?” she asks again, keeping her voice steady.

Sherlock finally looks at her. It’s been almost two years since Moriarty shot a man in their home- justice, as it turns out, takes a long time, especially if a criminal might be _useful_ \- and almost a year and a half since Moriarty nearly died in his arms, and he still looks wounded. He’s gotten better, over the months, even at times been able to let the shadow of Irene go, but she appears sometimes, haunting their lives, unacknowledged. He went to see her twice, while she was waiting for her trial, and he never told her what she said, only came home and walked past Joan, down to his room, the room where Irene once slept, and closed the door.

He’s better, but Joan knows well that you don’t just recover immediately from someone emotionally manipulating and abusing you for years.

“You know the answer to that,” Sherlock says finally.

“Will you be angry if I go?” Joan asks.

Sherlock blinks, and a look of confusion crosses his face. “No, of course not. I am not your keeper, Watson. I just want to make sure you understand that you need not put yourself in that situation, if you don’t wish to.”

“I know,” she says. “But I also know that she’s up to something.”

“You can’t possibly believe she’ll tell you what it is,” Sherlock scoffs.

“Of course not,” Joan says, flexing her hands. “But she could let something slip, or I might be able to poke at her enough to make her reveal something. I’m a blind spot for her, Sherlock. I can use that.”

She doesn’t look at him, studying her hands instead. She doesn’t look at Sherlock, and she doesn’t look at the trunk of cold cases in the corner behind him. They’re all his cold cases, except for one. Except for their one shared failure. Kayden Fuller. 

They were never able to find where Moriarty sent Kayden. She and Sherlock spent weeks sending out descriptions of Kayden to different police organizations all over the world, emailing photos to people who have their ear to the ground, and they came up with nothing. Sherlock seems to have moved on, but Joan returns to their failure weekly, staring at the case file and the happy, smiling girl in the photo. It eats at her, the fact that she couldn’t return her to her family, her _real_ family.

If she can push Moriarty, maybe she can push her enough to find out something about Kayden.

He gives her a suspicious look, like he knows where her mind is dwelling, but he doesn’t pursue it, just says, “Perhaps. It’s well reasoned.”

“You still don’t like it,” she says, sighing.

Sherlock makes a noise under his breath and moves further into her room, running his hand over the mantelpiece and then finally sits down in his chair. He licks his lips.

Joan waits. They don’t talk about Moriarty very often, and when they do, it usually ends with Sherlock setting something on fire or destroying something useful. He’s never sought her out for a discussion. Not about this. She doesn’t blame him. Alfredo has never told her anything concrete, but he’s hinted that they talk about it sometimes, and Ms. Hudson has said they’ve discussed abusive, toxic relationships, and thus Irene, in a vague way from time to time, so she knows he’s working through it, in his own way. Just not with her.

“She is- not to be trusted,” he says jerkily. “You need to remember that. She is very charming, very intelligent. Even knowing what she is, it can be… difficult to remember, when confronted with her.”

Joan wants to tell him that she was never in love with Irene. That she never thought she was the reason behind her death. She wants to explain to him that there is no history between them that could possibly muddy things. She wants to tell him that yes, she spent time with Irene when she was still Irene and confused and scared and vulnerable, but she doesn’t think that a handful of chess games and discussions about impressionist painters is enough to ensnare her. She wants to tell him about the conversation she and Moriarty had during the Fuller case, and how charm and intelligence had no role there, just grasping, clawing jealousy. She wants to tell him that she’ll be fine.

“I’ll be careful,” she says instead, because it’s what he needs. And because it’s the truth.

Sherlock sags in the chair and looks down at his hands. “Please do.”

Joan watches him for a while longer, but he doesn’t say anything else, and she doesn’t have anything to add. So she picks up her glasses, slides them back onto her face, and then picks up her book again. 

He doesn’t leave until seventy-nine pages later.

******  
She walks through Newgate security, lets them pat her down, waits patiently while they explain the process to her (though she has been here before; she knows guards at both Newgate and Sing Sing at this point) and then escort her inside to where Moriarty is waiting.

Moriarty looks… far better than Joan had hoped. It’s a petty thought, maybe, but she had been hoping that the reality of prison would wipe that little smirk off her face. Instead, Moriarty manages to make her orange jumpsuit seem like haute couture. She’s sitting at a table, her smirk firmly in place, hands cuffed loosely to the table.

Joan sits down across from her.

“Joan!” Moriarty says, her smirk blossoming into a smile. “What a pleasure to see you. Thank you for coming.”

“What do you want?” Joan says.

Moriarty raises an eyebrow. “Why, Joan, is that any way to greet an old friend?”

Joan doesn’t rise to the bait, simply folds her hands on the table and leans forward. “You have five minutes. What do you want?”

Moriarty’s smile flickers for just a second before returning to its original shape, and Joan imagines that she’s frustrated her. Possibly surprised her. Joan smiles blandly back.

“Only five minutes? Joan, surely you have more time to spare for me.”

Joan pointedly looks at her watch. It isn’t as though she has anything planned for the rest of the day, certain that her meeting wasn’t going to go well, but she wants Moriarty to know that she’s only here because she wants to be. Not because she feels any obligation to her, and certainly not because she finds Moriarty interesting. Moriarty is a criminal, and not a sympathetic one. She doesn’t believe in the idea that there are evil people; Joan likes to believe that everyone has some good in them. Moriarty strains that belief.

Moriarty’s smile drains away, and for a heartbeat she looks pale and too thin. She purses her lips and sighs. “Fine. Heaven forbid we stick with civility. I have a proposal for you.”

Joan leans back in her chair. “Go ahead.”

She has no intention of accepting any proposal Moriarty puts to her, but then Moriarty says, “I will provide the names of my personnel and the crimes they have committed, with evidence, if you will visit me once a week and play a game of Go with me.”

Joan tries to keep her features bland, but she’s sure she’s given away some sort of reaction. She shifts in her chair and crosses her legs. “Go?” she asks. “Really? I thought all criminal masterminds played chess.”

“No, darling,” Moriarty corrects, that damn smirk reappearing. “Not all criminal masterminds. Only the bad ones. The good ones play Go.”

“And yet here you are,” Joan shoots back dismissively. 

“Do you accept?” Moriarty asks, ignoring her.

Joan doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t know what to say.

Everything about Moriarty is a calculation, Joan knows. Smiles flickering, serious looks, minute adjustments of body language- it’s all an act. She was able to pretend to be a trauma survivor in the hospital, in their home, under almost constant surveillance, for nearly a week without a single slip. She pretended to be an American art restorer who loved Sherlock for _months_ and he never suspected. She knows how to get what she wants. She knows exactly what to do to make people break. It’s what she does.

But Joan is also far too aware of the fact that, in the two years that Moriarty was awaiting and then undergoing trial, her organization went on unhindered. She has loyal lieutenants, possibly still awaiting instructions, and lieutenants going rogue and kidnapping children. She and Sherlock have managed to find her organization in the shadows of three different crimes this year alone, though they’ve never been able to definitively prove it. They could use the information. It would be infinitely useful. 

Which Moriarty knows. Which means it’s not the sort of proposal she should accept.

“Why?” she asks abruptly.

Moriarty shrugs eloquently. “Possibly because I’ve only been here for three weeks and I can already feel my brain dribbling out my ears. I long for intelligent conversation, Joan, and a good game of Go.” She pauses and adjusts her hands where they’re laying on the table. The handcuffs bang against the table, the noise familiar from all the nights Joan has heard Sherlock do the same thing. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Joan, that it’s a win-win game. I get what I want. You get what you need.”

She looks harmless, in her orange jumpsuit and handcuffed hands, her hair tugged back in a messy ponytail. 

Joan stands up. “Your five minutes are up,” she says, and signals for the guard to lead her away.

******  
When she gets home, Sherlock is right where she left him in the morning. The record player is playing quietly, something soft and sad, and he is lying on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling, hands folded on his stomach. His bare toes are wiggling in time to the music. Joan walks past him, down to his room, and then comes back to the living room.

“Get up,” she says, tossing him his purple zebra stripe socks. “We’re going for a walk.”

He looks at her face, and then does as she says. They’re out the door four minutes later, once Sherlock is able to find his other shoe (it was in the oven and no, she doesn’t want to know).

Joan doesn’t say anything for a while, lets Sherlock’s babble rush over her. He points out random people as they walk by, telling her portions of their life story, occasionally making something up so ridiculous that she gives him a look and he appears contrite. Occasionally she chimes in, the deductions coming easily. It’s reassuring, the normality of it, even if she feels sick. When they reach the entrance of the park, Joan steers them inside and then takes a deep breath.

Sherlock instantly falls silent, shoving his hands further into his pockets.

“Do you play Go?” she asks. It’s not what she really wants to talk about, but it’s the best she can do for now.

Sherlock blinks, but he doesn’t press. “You mean weiqi? I know how to play it,” he says. “I wouldn’t say that I’m a weiqi player.”

Joan tugs her scarf over her chin, and yanks her gloves more firmly into place. It’s October, now, and it’s beginning to get cold in the city. Some stores have already put up their Christmas lights and are playing Christmas music. It’s annoying, though not for the usual reasons. Sherlock is prone to outbursts in the stores once the Christmas season officially starts, irritated by the lights and the music that he can’t block out. It means she does more than her fair share of grocery shopping.

“Do you like Go?” she asks.

He gives her a strange look, but again, doesn’t pressure her for more information. “I find it tedious and dull, on the whole. It’s no substitute for actual mental stimulation. Do you play?”

“No,” Joan replies, and then hesitates. “I mean, I did. When I was a kid. I was even in a Go club for a while. But…”

“But?” Sherlock prods, keeping his eyes fixed on the path ahead of them. There aren’t many other people out in the park right now. They’re probably at work, or inside, warm and cozy. She’s beginning to regret insisting on a walk.

“But I was never very good,” Joan admits, and it almost feels shameful to say it, though she doesn’t know why.

No. That’s a lie. She knows why. “Oren was excellent at weiqi, and my mom is actually an amateur dan,” she explains. “But I could never get the hang of it.” 

She remembers people coming over to play against her mom on weekends, when she had the time, or going to the park and watching endless games. It was a special world that her mom and Oren shared, a language and a hobby all at once, and she was never a part of it. They both had an amazing ability to look at a board and see all the possibilities.

Joan can’t do that.

“I’m terrible at it,” Sherlock says casually. “Mycroft plays, and he could usually beat me within ten minutes, whether on a nine by nine board or a nineteen by nineteen board. I think I’ve won maybe three matches in my entire life, and two of those were against a computer, with a six piece handicap.”

“Okay, I’m not that bad,” Joan says, letting out a startled laugh. Sherlock smiles down at her, and then sobers.

“Why the sudden interest in Go?”

Joan bites her lip. She’s reluctant to explain the deal.

Explaining means that he’ll spend hours ruminating on all her possible schemes, which is ultimately useless and often results in an interrupted night’s sleep. But not telling him would be even worse. He might rage about Moriarty manipulating her, but she won’t keep things from him, not about her.

“Moriarty,” she says, trying to ignore the slight flinch from Sherlock. “She… offered me a bargain.”

“Don’t take it.”

“You don’t know what it is yet.”

“But I know Moriarty. Don’t take it. It’s a trap of some sort.”

Joan shakes her head, holding back a sigh. “Probably. But I can’t ignore the opportunity for free information. Playing a game of Go every week would be worth it.”

“It’s the same deal she offered to the FBI and Scotland Yard,” he says sharply, “and we both saw what happened to them.”

“I know,” she says calmly. “It’s a risk I’m willing to take.” 

He doesn’t say anything for a while, just walks to her left and slightly behind, staring down at the ground. Joan focuses on the path in front of them, listening to the leaves crunch beneath her boots. He’s considering, analyzing, weighing their options in his head. She thinks he probably could be a good Go player, if he could sit still long enough. But he can’t, and his skills at analysis are better at looking at real life, where choices matter.

Joan’s already decided what she’s going to do. Moriarty is a liar and a murderer, but she’s also their best hope of ever finding Kayden Fuller and bringing down the rest of her empire. Even if she lies to them the entire time, Joan believes they can take her lies and work with them. Every bit of information is useful, even if it isn’t real.

“I don’t like it,” Sherlock says eventually. He looks at her and gives her a crooked, pained grin. “But I rather suspect my opinion isn’t valid. You’re going to do it, hmm?”

She nods slowly. “I’m going to do it.”

“Just be careful,” he says. Then he brightens. “Hot dogs!” 

Where Sherlock got his fondness for New York hot dogs, Joan will never know, but she hands him a twenty dollar bill and watches him scurry over to the cart with fond amusement. When he comes back, he hands her one, with simple ketchup and mustard. The other two, one covered in what looks to be everything from the cart, the other with just relish, he keeps for himself. She doesn’t bother asking for her change back. She’ll just dig it out from his coat pocket later.

When they get home, Sherlock pulls out some cold case boxes, sent over by Captain Gregson just after Moriarty’s conviction, and sits down in the middle of their living room, spreading the files around him, his hands darting out suddenly and touching the paper, fingertips running over the ink, chatting to her and not to her about the features of each case. Joan sits down across from him, folding her legs carefully and deftly organizes the folders into an order that makes sense to her.

“Let’s look at this one,” she says after listening to him ramble for twenty minutes. She taps the file, and he focuses instantly.

They spend the rest of the evening carefully not talking about Moriarty, about the deal that Joan is going to make, and instead solve the case of Mrs. Castor’s missing jewels.

When Joan is packing up the files, Sherlock hesitates for just a moment, and then says, “I’m terrible at weiqi, but I do play an excellent game of poker, if you’re interested.”

Joan tips her head down, hiding her smile behind her hair. “Sounds good,” she says.

******  
She returns to the prison a week later and waits patiently for the guards to bring out Moriarty. While she waits, she carefully sets down the Go board she bought at a secondhand store and divides the white and black pieces up, dropping them one at a time into their respective bowls. When Moriarty appears, she doesn’t disguise her surprise nearly so well.

“Interesting,” Moriarty says, sitting down. She doesn’t look as collected today, her jumpsuit sagging in all the wrong places and her hair greasy, tied up away from her face. The disheveled look does nothing to disguise the sharp, calculating look she gives Joan as she sits. Then her expression changes, so quick that Joan almost would think she imagined the look, if it was anyone other than Moriarty. She beams at Joan. “I told Sherlock he was the only person who could surprise me, but he said there were two. I suppose he was right.”

Joan doesn’t tell her that she’s heard the story, that Sherlock told her, that she listened to the recording later, that she listened to it again when Moriarty was on trial. She just gives her a tight smile and says, “I never said no.”

“But you didn’t say yes, either,” Moriarty says. “And a definitive yes is very important.” She looks down at the board, her handcuffed hands reaching out to touch the edge, almost reverently. She looks back up at Joan. “I should not have presumed- you do know how to play?”

Joan nods. “I do. Though not well.”

Moriarty shrugs, far too casually for Joan’s liking. “That’s quite all right. Even a poor player brings something to the game.” Then she grins, not at all like her slow, deadly smirk. This is a vicious, bright grin, with too many teeth. She fights the urge to recoil from it. “But I rather suspect that you’re not as poor a player as you make yourself out to be, Joan.”

Joan keeps her face blank. “We’ll find out. Black or white?”

“Seeing as you’re somewhat uncertain in your skills, you play black,” Moriarty says, reaching forward and awkwardly drawing the bowl of white stones toward her. She dips her fingers in, stirring them and smiling. For just a moment, she doesn’t look like a criminal mastermind. She just looks like a woman.

It’s an act, and Joan knows it, but she can feel something inside of her shift. She firmly tamps it down.

She takes the cup of black stones and looks at the board, trying to remember her mother’s advice when she was nine, playing Oren and losing badly. Defend the corners, her mother always said. They’re the vulnerable spots. Defend them. If you have lost all four corners, then you have lost.

Joan takes a black stone and carefully lays it on the board, the fourth point from the edge.

Moriarty nods her approval. “Classic opening strategy,” she says.

“You’re not going to narrate the entire time, are you?” Joan asks, scowling. Moriarty reaches out and sets down her white stone right next to Joan’s black. Dingshi, she remembers. Joseki. Her mother’s hands on her shoulders, carefully coaching her. Oren, telling her not to be bound by dingshi.

“You never said I had to remain silent, Joan,” Moriarty says. “Your turn.”

It’s only her second move, and Joan already feels a rising sense of anxiety. She gently quashes it and then puts her piece in the opposite corner.

******  
“Watson! You’re home!” Sherlock says when she walks in the door.

“I see your observation skills haven’t diminished since I left this morning,” Joan says dryly, tugging her scarf off. Sherlock dashes down the stairs and takes her hat when she thrusts it at him.

“Detective Bell called while you were away,” he says, putting her hat on the hook and then accepting her gloves. “He said he has a potential case for us, and that once you return we ought to stop by the precinct to take a look.”

Joan pauses and sighs. “You couldn’t have told me this before I took off my things?”

Sherlock’s eyes are wide. He blinks. “I apologize. I thought you would like to rest for a while before heading out, but I suppose if you’d like to go immediately, that is perfectly amenable to me.”

“We always go immediately,” Joan says, confused.

“You usually haven’t spent an afternoon with Moriarty beforehand,” Sherlock says. “It seems prudent to make allowances for that.”

She can feel him hesitating, knows the question he wants to ask. She waits, though, and hangs up her coat. She wants tea, and she doesn’t want to put words into his mouth. She brushes by him and walks down to the kitchen, Sherlock just behind her.

“Do you want some?” she asks, pulling out the kettle and filling it with water.

Sherlock considers, shifting on his feet. “I haven’t done the shopping for a while,” he says. “What sorts do we have left?”

Joan opens the cupboard next to the refrigerator, scanning the contents. “Some Celestial Seasonings,” she says, ignoring the face he makes. “Oolong, Earl Grey, Lady Grey, English Breakfast, and White Darjeeling.”

“Oolong will do nicely,” he says, and she tugs out the box, selecting the White Darjeeling for herself. They technically keep it for Ms. Hudson, but Joan doubts she’ll mind.

“We have a lot of tea,” she comments, since he doesn’t seem eager to ask his question just yet. She pulls two mugs out of the dish drainer, checking to make sure that they’re actually clean. Sherlock’s dishwashing skills range from “obsessive” to “highly distracted” and she doesn’t want to be surprised by black bits floating to the top.

“We drink a lot of tea,” Sherlock says, shrugging his shoulders and moving to sit down at the table. Joan goes to sit across from him, waiting for the water to boil.

“Did it go well?” Sherlock finally asks, and Joan releases a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding in. She purses her lips and thinks about it.

“It didn’t go poorly,” she says, trying to figure out how to describe what happened.

It was suspiciously dull, in truth. After the first twenty pieces or so were on the board, Moriarty slipped into silence, focusing on her pieces and no longer poking at Joan. Joan had just tried to remember her mom’s words, tried to remember playing Go in the school club and everything that she learned. From time to time she looked up from the board to find Moriarty watching her. It was creepy, but unsurprising.

She lost the game, but Moriarty had still given her a name.

“Merridew,” she says, and Sherlock perks up.

“As in Fred Merridew?” he asks.

Joan nods. “Moriarty said he’s a con artist that works for her. She said we should take a good look at his garage.”

Sherlock taps his fingers on the table, starting slow and speeding up, until they’re beating out a relentless rhythm. Joan stands up and walks over to the stove, lifting the kettle off the burner as it starts whistling and pouring the water into the mugs. She picks the mugs up and sets one in front of Sherlock, holding hers between her hands. She’s still cold. December is right around the corner, just a month and a half away. She needs to start figuring out gifts for people.

“We’ll let Gregson know, hmm?” Sherlock says finally, his hand coming to a halt suddenly.

Joan raises her eyebrows. “You don’t want to track him down yourself?”

Sherlock’s smile is brittle as he lifts the mug to his lips. “I would rather work in conjunction with the police if a case involves Moriarty. It seems safer, in case she has laid a trap.” He takes a sip, hissing as it burns his tongue, and sets the mug down again. “Did you win your game?”

Joan shakes her head slowly. “No.” She can’t remember a time when Sherlock expressed concern over his own safety. Her own, yes, all the time, until she finally shut that argument down by smacking him across the shoulders with her baton in a fit of irritation during practice. But not his own. Never his own. 

“No matter,” Sherlock says, waving a careless hand. He’s been biting his nails, Joan notes. “The games aren’t the important bit anyway.”

She nods, blowing on her tea, but suspects that this time, Sherlock is wrong.

******  
Sherlock tells her to Google Fred Merridew. He clearly knows who the man is, so Joan pulls out her laptop and carefully taps the name in. 

There are plenty of results, and most of them appear to be regular people. Salespeople, for the most part, some mechanics. But there is only one Fred Merridew that pops up again and again, only one Fred Merridew who isn’t attached solely to a LinkedIn account or a Facebook.

Joan reads about B-list actor Fred Merridew with some interest. He’s been on all the Law and Order shows, as any good bit actor is, and on most of the CSIs, along with other crime shows. His imdb page would be impressive, if he hadn’t only been in one episode on each show. She pulls up Wikipedia to read episodes synopses and soon discovers that Fred Merridew has played the criminals more often than he’s played the victims. She wonders if he has one of those faces, the ones that, according to the magical world of television, means that he looks like a criminal.

“You said he was a con artist,” Joan says when Sherlock comes back into the computer room, holding a bowl of jello. “But I don’t see anything here that suggests a criminal history. Crimes against acting, maybe, but no actual crimes.”

“The acting is his day job,” Sherlock says, sitting down at his desk. “His hobby, as it were, is confidence trickery. He’s been an investment firm, a mortgage lender, a sweepstakes representative, a pharmaceuticals salesman… if you name the scam, he’s probably done it.”

“Why would Moriarty keep a minor actor and general grifter on her payroll?” she asks, clicking on another link. This one pulls up a photo of Fred Merridew. He’s a middle-aged balding white guy. He’s pretty forgettable, on the whole. She’s seen plenty of Law and Order and CSI, and she doesn’t remember ever seeing him.

“There was a notable shift in his crime starting in 2009,” Sherlock says. He picks up his jello- it’s blue, and it’s staining his tongue, she notices absently- and comes over, dragging a stool to sit beside her. He claims the mouse and keyboard, pulling up a document from a folder he’s simply titled “Everyone”.

“Are those FBI files?” she asks.

“I have a contact, Watson, our good friends of Everyone.”

“Because ongoing contact with our illegal hacker collective is such a great idea,” she mumbles. Sherlock ignores her, clicking on some more things until the same photo of Fred Merridew that she was just looking at appears on the screen. Joan reads the page. It has a list of crimes, all under the headline of _Suspected Activity_.

“If you’ll notice, before 2009, he specialized almost exclusively in small cons. His specialty was the fake casting agent scam, though he was known to have done some minor insurance scams as well. He selected marks one at a time, and received minor payouts.”

“You call a two thousand dollar payout minor?” Joan asks, looking at a summary of one of his earliest crimes.

“For a professional criminal? Of course. Moriarty spends two thousand dollars on her purses, she doesn’t need a con man for her pocket money. But then, look. August of 2009. Suddenly he’s in the midst of an investment scam, with twenty people handing him money all at once. When he disappears, he walks away with half a million dollars. A bit of a step up from two thousand, hmm?”

Joan looks at the screen. 2009 onward is a list of large amounts of money. She can’t even imagine that amount of money.

“Okay, so if all of this is known, then why isn’t he in jail? Why is he still appearing in subpar crime procedurals?”

“Subpar? Watson, I thought you enjoyed those shows.”

“Sherlock.”

“Lack of evidence, primarily,” he says, returning to the point after her glare. “He has a remarkably forgettable face, and he uses a wide spectrum of aliases. Before 2009, he had one or two, and if you poked at them hard enough they tended to fall apart. After 2009, his aliases link to shell company after shell company, and it becomes impossible to find the end of the rabbit hole. He also moved around quite a bit, and rarely hit marks in the same police precinct, so it took longer to put together who he was.”

“So the only thing that remains the same is that he’s so boring looking that no one remembers his face in any detail.”

“Indeed.”

Joan looks at the screen, at the lengthy list of crimes and victims, at the terrifying monetary amounts. “So Moriarty hires him for his face and the fact that he’s never been caught, sends him on bigger schemes, and provides him with stronger aliases to match the increasing difficulty of his crimes.”

“I believe so, yes. I believe she used Merridew not just to provide funds for her crimes, but- if you’ll look at the real estate frauds he perpetrated over the years- possibly also property that she needed. There’s no evidence of that, but look at the pattern.”

Joan nods slowly, scrolling down the list. “The properties that got foreclosed upon are all within a block of major crimes that occurred shortly afterwards. A bank robbery, a kidnapping, a murder…”

“Merridew wasn’t the assassin, of course. He merely allowed for the groundwork to be laid,” Sherlock says. He scrapes the edges of the bowl with his spoon, licking the last of the jello off. “Now. Detective Bell is waiting for us. Shall we go look in Merridew’s garage?”

Joan doesn’t have to consider for long. She closes the screen of the computer and stands up. “Let’s go.”

******  
Merridew has briefcases full of money in a hidden compartment in his garage wall. He has falsified documents from nearly twenty-two schemes over the past ten years.

He also has a mean left hook, which Sherlock discovers the hard way.

Between the money, the assault, and the files, it’s enough to put him in jail for a while.

When they get home, Joan stands in the doorway, watching Sherlock ice his jaw, and thinks. 

“Gathering wool, Watson?” Sherlock asks, his words coming out garbled. He’ll have an ugly bruise by tomorrow, though an herbal poultice will help keep the swelling down.

“Why does she want Merridew in jail?” she asks, moving into the kitchen to adjust the way he’s holding his bag of ice. “There has to be a reason that he’s the sacrifice this week. He didn’t seem like the type to be plotting against her- he was an occasional hire, not a trusted lieutenant- and I can’t imagine how he would hurt any of her plans.”

Sherlock takes the bag of ice off his face and carefully prods his jawline, wincing as he does so. “It is something to ponder,” he says.

She sits down. “I don’t like this,” she says. “There’s something we’re missing here, something important. Why Merridew?”

“It is the trouble with someone like Moriarty,” he says with the tone of a man who knows. “You are always asking _why_ , and rarely able to form a true conclusion. I recommend that, for now, we put it out of minds.”

Joan nods vaguely, but she has no intention of putting it out of her mind, and she suspects Sherlock feels the same way. But for the time being, she grabs the hand that Sherlock is holding his ice in, and pushes it back up toward his face. She’ll focus on what she can solve right away.

******  
“Where did you learn how to play Go?” Joan asks, putting down a black piece on the board.

Moriarty raises her eyebrows. She looks better, this time, more colour in her cheeks, her hair clean though still pulled back in a severe looking ponytail. “Do you expect an honest answer?”

“No,” Joan answers, putting her fingers in her bowl full of stones, moving them around and listening to the clacking sound. She knows better than to expect honesty. She’s just hoping for information.

“Very well,” Moriarty says. “I learned to play on my father’s knee. He had quite a fondness for Go, but then, he was a colonel and thought that Go was a good game for anyone who used military tactics.”

She sets down a white stone and collects Joan’s pieces. Then, abruptly, her body language shifts, turns inward, and she rips her eyes away from Joan’s face, studying the floor. “My first boyfriend taught me,” she says, her accent American, and suddenly she’s Irene again, the Irene that Joan knew. “He believed that everyone should have a strong background in logic.”

And then again, her chin lifting in a way that is haughty and confident, but not quite Moriarty. When she speaks, her accent is German. “I taught myself,” she says, and Joan doesn’t know who this is, but she suspects that if she had ever met her, she would have liked her. “Chess was too easy, and I understood that Go was more interesting. So I read the books and taught myself.”

And one more time, a neutral body language, eyes wide and kind, a small smile that doesn’t look anything like Moriarty’s perpetual smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. “I joined a club. There was this girl, really smart and pretty, and I figured if I learned how to play, maybe she’d pay attention to me. It didn’t work like that, but I did like the game.”

Then Moriarty is back. “Pick one,” she says, and puts her stone on the board.

The name she gives, after the board is thoroughly hers, is John Vincent Harden. Joan tucks it away in her mind, but also tucks away the two women she’s never met, the German woman and the sweet, shy English girl, suspecting that either one might become relevant at another time.

When she gets home, Sherlock is waiting for her. “Alfredo called,” he says, eyes remaining on his book. “He has a new car for us.”

Joan suspects that the car is a favour that Sherlock asked for weeks ago, but she doesn’t push, just sighs and loops her scarf back around her neck. “The new name was John Vincent Harden,” she says.

“The tobacco millionaire?”

“The same,” she says.

Sherlock twists his mouth to the side, biting the inside of his cheek. Joan waits. There is a chance she might get to stay inside, where it’s warm, for another hour while he digs out any information he has on Harden.

“Car first,” Sherlock decides with a nod. “It has a new security system that I’m eager to explore. Then we shall look into the fascinating world of tobacco corporations.”

“Oh, great,” Joan sighs. “ _That_ promises to be fun and not at all skeezy.”

******  
On her third visit, Joan plays white.

“I prefer to play white, on the whole,” Moriarty says, switching the bowls. “But I find it useful to play from a different perspective sometimes. And it is, of course, always interesting to see how your opponent plays when their usual position is reversed.”

Joan doesn’t say anything. She usually doesn’t say much during these visits, not wanting to give Moriarty anything that she can use. She suspects that’s wishful thinking, but it comforts her, in its way. She waits for Moriarty to put down a stone, following suit nearly immediately. She has given up playing with a strategy.

“You know, I still don’t understand you,” Moriarty says later into the game.

Joan keeps her eyes fixed on the stones. “That’s nice,” she says.

“And I did say that women are trickier, but really, Joan. You are… unique.”

Joan goes cold, but doesn’t move, instead setting down another stone and managing to capture four pieces of Moriarty’s. The word _unique_ has special connotations when Moriarty says it. She has listened to the recordings, and she has listened to Sherlock’s stories.

She called Sherlock _unique_ and it didn’t turn out very well for him.

“You see, you aren’t as clever as Sherlock,” Moriarty says. “I can tell. Sherlock has a beautiful mind, like a diamond, so many different facets, so bright and so hard. You aren’t like him at all.”

Joan gives her a pinched smile. “Are you saying I’m ordinary?” she asks.

Moriarty rolls her eyes. “Do you think I’d bother with the ordinary?” she asks. “I’m saying that if Sherlock is a Matisse, you’re a Pollack.”

“I prefer Kollwitz, on the whole,” Joan replies.

“You’re nothing like a Kollwitz.”

“I didn’t say I was,” Joan says. “I said I liked her. We don’t all choose what we like based on who they remind us of.” She gives Moriarty a hard look, wondering if she understands what she’s saying.

Moriarty puts down her stone, and then leans forward, eyes bright. She understands. “What am I, Joan?”

She considers not answering. She considers claiming to know nothing about art. It would be a lie, though, and she knows Moriarty would see right through it, after their halting discussions about art when Moriarty was Irene. Joan tries not to lie, when she’s with Moriarty, even if she tries not to tell the truth, either.

“An impressionist,” she says finally.

“Monet,” Moriarty breathes, and her fingers twitch. Joan notes it.

“No,” she says. “Seurat. Look too close, and the picture falls apart.”

Moriarty’s smile freezes in the place. Joan looks down at the board and lets herself feel pleased. She puts another stone on the board. She’s starting a ko fight. It should be interesting.

“Seurat was post-impressionism,” Moriarty says, her voice dripping with disdain, but Joan ignores her. She focuses on the fight ahead of her.

******  
“Did Irene ever discuss art with you?” Joan asks when she’s home, writing down the name Moriarty gave her.

Sherlock looks up from the table. He’s dipping shoes into ink and pressing them onto a piece of paper. Probably trying to make a book of shoe impressions, she decides. He’s very good at the difference between a basic sling back and a stiletto, but he has some trouble with others, like older Nikes and expensive women’s shoes.

“Occasionally,” he says. “My own knowledge of art is rather utilitarian and revolves around its criminal history, and so we couldn’t discuss it very often, but she did sometimes just talk _at_ me about it. Why?”

“Did she have a favorite artist, or style of painting?” she asks, walking over to the table.

Sherlock thinks about it, dipping another shoe into the ink. “She expressed a fondness for impressionists, I believe,” he says. “She rather liked the transient nature of them. Monet, in particular. She had a few originals. Stolen, of course.”

“Of course,” Joan says. She smiles down at her papers, pleased. “Detective Baynes is our name this week. Crooked cop on her payroll.” She starts to shift through the sheets of paper he’s already pressed shoes onto, reading his sharp, angular handwriting at the bottom, noting which shoe each print belongs to.

“If it’s a detective, we ought to leave immediately,” Sherlock says, bursting with sudden energy. He drops the Converse heels he’s holding back into the ink and grabs her by the elbow, tugging her toward the door. Joan pulls away, immediately suspicious. She flips three more pages back and scowls.

“Are those my Zara boots?” she asks, pulling out the page in question.

“Come along, Watson,” Sherlock says. “A crooked cop isn’t-”

“Sherlock,” she interrupts, putting one hand on her hips and shoving the sheet into his face. “Are those my Zara boots? Did you dip my boots into ink?”

Sherlock presses his lips into a thin line and fidgets. It’s all the answer she needs. She sighs and rubs her forehead. “Just tell me you cleaned them off when you were done.”

******  
After Detective Baynes is arrested (which takes some maneuvering – it turns out Baynes’ captain didn’t care so much about him being on Moriarty’s payroll, but he _did_ care about Baynes sleeping with his wife; once he learned about that, the captain found himself abruptly interested in Baynes’ other activities), screaming about his innocence and shouting the names of other dirty cops that Moriarty presumably didn’t mean to give up, Joan and Sherlock go out for dinner.

They usually just order takeout, or they cook whatever food they have in the brownstone, but Joan knows that they’re out of basically everything except eggs, and she wants to be out for a while, not surrounded by all the accoutrements of their profession. So she drags Sherlock to a nice mom-and-pop restaurant and tells him to suck it up.

“Have you thought any more about why she is giving us these names?” Joan asks, scanning the menu. She just wants something simple tonight. Maybe a grilled cheese sandwich.

Sherlock tosses his menu to the edge of the table and shakes his head. “I suspect she has her reasons. And I suspect that none of her reasons have anything to do with being a decent citizen who wants to make good.”

Joan rolls her eyes. “I wasn’t suggesting that.”

“I didn’t say you were. But a number of people probably think that her agreeing to turn in her old cohorts means she is atoning for her actions.”

“She’s not atoning,” Joan says firmly. “She doesn’t regret a single thing.”

“Nothing?” Sherlock asks, and she knows what he means without him having to say it. _Not even getting caught?_

Joan considers, setting her menu on top of Sherlock’s and stirring the ice in her water with her straw. “I think prison was hard for her, at first,” she says. “But she’s made it work, somehow.”

“I see,” Sherlock says, and starts playing with his straw, using it as a pipette. Joan ignores him.

“So what is she getting out of it?” Joan asks, talking more to herself now. She’s been struggling with this since the beginning, and watching Baynes get arrested has only made it worse. “There has to be a reason for her giving up all these people who used to work for her. Do you think she’s clearing the ranks?”

He shrugs. “Possibly. It would be very Moriarty, having us do her dirty work for her.”

The server arrives at their table. Joan orders her grilled cheese, and Sherlock orders a burger. Once he leaves, Sherlock reaches out and snags the creamers, building a tower out of them. Joan just continues stirring her water, watching the ice swirl around.

“It isn’t as if they’d be put in the same prison as her, not with our testimony,” Joan says. “So they aren’t useful to her that way. Is it a signal to the rest of her people? Or has her organization broken down? Maybe Gaspar wasn’t an isolated incident.”

“Or perhaps it’s exactly what she says it is: a bargaining tool in order to get you to show up every week,” Sherlock says.

“She called me unique,” Joan confesses.

“You are,” Sherlock says easily. “In my experience, at any rate.”

“She called you unique,” Joan says, not wanting to poke at that wound, no matter how scarred over it is. 

He doesn’t flinch this time. “She did. But I think it is possible, Watson, that she provides the names because you will come for them, every time. And so she gets to learn about you. It’s why I was hesitant to let you go.”

“You didn’t _let_ me go,” Joan says. “Your opinion matters, but I would have gone anyway.”

He nods, conceding the point with an elegance he wouldn’t have shown a year ago. “Very true. A poor choice of words.”

“She just doesn’t seem like someone who would let prison be the end,” she says. “We know she has some sort of plan. And I’m worried that I’m playing into it, somehow. But we need those names.”

He sighs, and leans back as their server puts their plates in front of them. “I know,” he says, and sounds tired.

She decides to change the subject, if not by much. “I was thinking,” she says slowly, “that maybe we should look into Merridew’s crimes some more. If he was defrauding people out of their homes, and you think those homes were chosen for their vicinity to a crime…”

“Then it is worth examining those particular crimes for a Moriarty connection,” Sherlock finishes for her. He hums an approving note, and then knocks over his cream tower. “A superb idea, Watson. She may come to regret giving you Merridew.” 

When they get home, she heads for the closet where they keep case files, but Sherlock stops her and challenges her to a game of poker. She nearly says no, wanting to get to work, but stops herself. She cannot allow Moriarty to become an obsession.

“All right,” she says, smiling and tossing her hair over her shoulder. “But I hope you’re prepared to lose.”

“I happen to be an excellent poker player, Watson,” Sherlock says, his tone offended. “I suspect I’ll be quite a challenge for you.”

They play for two hours, Joan winning every game.

“The trick is to have a good poker face, Sherlock,” she says, laughing and scooting another pile of poker chips toward her. 

“I must say, I never expected you to be a good at poker,” he admits. “Normally a person can read every emotional nuance in your eyes or mouth. You have an honest face.”

“An honest face that doesn’t twitch and fidget with each new card.”

“Touché.”

******  
“Your real name didn’t come out during your trial,” Joan says, studying the board. “Is Moriarty as much of an alias as Irene was?”

Moriarty’s smile is fleeting. “Perhaps,” she says. “Or maybe it’s the only real name I’ve ever had, and I just took the time to destroy all my records.”

She considers, putting her stone on the board. She’s back to playing black, Moriarty’s brief interest in it having waned two visits ago. “I don’t think so,” Joan says eventually. “You took so much time to build documentation for Irene Adler that I don’t think you’d leave so obvious a clue as to destroy the documentation of your real identity. I think the real you is out there somewhere, waiting for us to find her.”

Moriarty carefully places her stone on the board, her fingers steady. After she puts it down, she looks up and gives Joan possibly the sharpest smile she’s seen yet. “Look at you,” Moriarty says. “Almost like a real detective.”

Joan bites back the instinctive response, the one that she’s said to too many friends over the past two and a half years, the _I am a real detective_ and instead tucks Moriarty’s reaction away. “So do you have a real name?”

“I have several,” Moriarty says, and shifts, Irene again to her core. “Irene Adler is just as real as Jamie Moriarty,” she says.

Joan finds these moments fascinating, when Moriarty suddenly becomes all these women without any effort whatsoever. They all have different speech patterns, accents, body language, and she wonders what it’s like to have them all hiding inside, waiting to come out. She wonders how many of them she’s used, and what for. 

“Do you have a name that wasn’t created for crime?” she asks. Irene smiles and shifts back to Moriarty.

“I do,” she says, “but I left it behind long ago.”

“So is there anything of the real you left?”

“I do love art,” she says. “And Go.”

“Anything else? Favorite foods or music? A belief system? A mom and dad?”

“Yes,” Moriarty says, except that she isn’t Moriarty, she’s the German woman that Joan suspects she could have fallen in love with, in another lifetime. It scares her, sometimes, to know that she could fallen for Moriarty’s traps. “I have all those things.”

“What’s _her_ name?” Joan asks, unable to hold back her curiosity anymore. Moriarty only puts her on occasionally, but she’s never mentioned her name.

“That would be telling,” the German woman says, and then Moriarty is back, shark smile and coy eyes. “It is your move, Joan.”

Joan slaps a stone on the board, careless. Moriarty raises her eyebrows. “Are you frustrated?”

“You have a plan,” she says. “You have a reason for all of this.”

“Well, of course I do,” she replies seriously. “Do you think I do anything without thinking it through? It’s the reason I am a very, very good Go player, Joan. It’s the reason I find chess tiresome. When you’re used to thinking fifteen steps ahead in life, one finds it boring to do so on a small board.”

“And yet you’ll play Go,” Joan says, rolling her eyes. 

Moriarty looks down at the game, and her shark smile softens. She reaches out, her handcuffs clanging against the table, and rests her fingertips on the very edge of the board. She always treats the board reverently, but now she looks like she’s approaching an altar.

“Go is about adaptation, Ms. Watson. In chess, one can memorize gambits and play the same patterns over and over again. There are strategies in Go, but your fundamental position must be one of adaptation. Chess is too rigid.”

“You like fluidity,” Joan says.

“I like opportunities,” Moriarty corrects, and sets down her stone. “Did you know that Go has 10^360 distinct possible games? Chess only has 10^123.”

“I did not know that,” Joan says.

“So you see, in the choice between chess and Go, I prefer the game with greater opportunity,” she says, and starts gathering up an entire section of the board. “More choices, you see, allows me to pick the choice with the least regret. Presuming one’s opponents are rational, of course. So few actually are.” Joan watches her pieces disappear with a feeling of resignation. Things can turn around in an instant in Go, but looking at the board, she knows the game is already lost. “Of course, in the choice between Go and real life, I will always choose real life. Some games are far more interesting than others, as you know. But for now, I’ll settle for Go.”

Moriarty looks up at her and smirks. “Your move, Joan.”

She steels herself, and studies the board.

******  
When she walks into the brownstone after visiting Moriarty during the week of Christmas, she’s greeted with the faint smell of smoke and the distant sound of an explosion. She considers, for half a moment, just heading for the bathroom and taking a long, luxurious bath, ignoring whatever Sherlock is doing, but then she sighs and heads up the stairs, balancing her weight on her toes.

She reaches the roof and opens the door. Over on the far side, away from the hives, Sherlock is waving his arms enthusiastically at Janae Wiggins, who is looking supremely unimpressed.

“Hey, you two,” she says, heading over. “What are you talking about?”

“Hey, Ms. J,” Janae says, waving. Joan smiles. 

Janae Wiggins was not meant to be one of the Irregulars, or even one of the “unofficial force” as Sherlock calls the kids he pays to spy for him. She was a witness for a case, and that was it. But then they had another case near the homeless shelter she lived in, and Janae volunteered to keep an eye out, and before long she was reporting to Joan and Sherlock on an almost weekly basis on the activities of various criminals. Joan thinks she takes pride in her work, though she has asked her on multiple occasions to give up the spying business until she’s older and to focus on school instead. The first time she suggested that, Janae stormed off and brought back her report card, a perfect column of As staring her in the face. Since then, Joan has simply let Janae come over whenever she feels like it, figuring that if she insists on being an amateur sleuth, she might as well be an amateur sleuth with adult supervision.

Well. Somewhat adult.

“I am attempting to teach Wiggins the value of a small and controlled explosion, rather than the larger, more unwieldy ones that she expresses a preference for,” Sherlock explains from where he’s standing. His hands are covered in muck. Joan hopes he wasn’t showing Janae the manure based bombs.

“And I am telling him that sometimes, a girl wants a big boom, not a little fizzle, if you catch my meaning Ms. J,” Janae says, waggling her eyebrows in a way that Joan suspects she thinks is salacious. It’s innocent and clownish instead. Janae talks big, but she’s still only thirteen-years-old.

Sherlock shoots Janae a glare, and Joan laughs. “I’m glad the chemistry lessons are coming in handy,” she says diplomatically.

To her amusement, both Sherlock and Janae start muttering darkly under their breath.

“What you been up to today, Ms. J?” Janae asks, abandoning Sherlock easily and walking over to join her. She hears a slight uptick in Sherlock’s muttering, but ignores him, focusing instead on what to tell Janae. She isn’t exactly eager to explain her latest work.

“Interviewing a criminal for information on their other crimes,” Joan settles on, and Janae wrinkles her nose.

“That sucks. Bet you’re exhausted. I’ll get out of your hair,” she replies, and then tosses another wave to Sherlock. “Bye, Mr. H. Thanks for the lessons. Can we do some more on acids next time? I’m trying to get into chemistry next year, want to make sure I can demonstrate some core knowledge.”

“Given the deplorable state of the American education system, I suspect that acids are far beyond the core knowledge,” Sherlock says, wiping his hands on his jeans.

Janae shrugs one shoulder, grinning cockily. “I know. I just wanna see some stuff melt.”

“Your fondness for destruction is disturbing, Wiggins,” Sherlock says primly. Joan snorts. Janae just laughs.

“Whatever. Bye, Ms. J! Good to see you.”

“Good night, Janae. Tell your mother we said hello,” Joan says, and passes her money to cover a cab ride. Janae starts to object, but under Joan’s sharp look accepts it with a sigh and a nod before disappearing down the steps.

After Janae is gone, Joan sinks into one of the observation chairs, closing her eyes. The hives are covered for the winter, their constant drone muted, but neither she nor Sherlock ever took the time to bring the chairs back down. She’s tired. Her back hurts, and her head aches. Christmas is in two days. Her mother called three days ago and asked her to come to Christmas dinner with Oren and Gabrielle, but she made something up about having plans. Her mom was hurt, she could tell, but Joan doesn’t want to sit down across from her right now. Not when she’s playing her mother’s game with an enemy.

“Enjoying the winter air, Watson?” Sherlock asks quietly, coming and sitting next to her.

“Something like that.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while, and she focuses on everything else around her. The cold wind, the buzz of the heating units on the roof, the noise below reminding her that New York City is still alive and well, the slight odour of manure wafting over from Sherlock’s direction- all of it is a welcome distraction.

Finally, Sherlock lets out a slightly impatient humming noise and says, “Today did not go well, I take it.”

Joan sighs and runs a hand through her hair, drawing her knees up to her chest. “It was… strange.” Sherlock waits, and Joan rubs at her eyes. “She… Irene wasn’t her only alias.”

“It would be disingenuous of us to presume it was,” he says steadily. “I have always assumed Moriarty is an alias as well.”

“Sometimes when we’re talking, she acts like the other women she’s been, and I’m wondering if there is some way we can use that,” Joan tells him. “Because most of them probably had a purpose, right? So they probably are attached to certain crimes. If we can put together enough of the aliases with the crimes, maybe we can figure out who Moriarty really is. Or at least figure out her other known associates, without having to wait a week for new names. I mean, since looking into Merridew and Harden and all the others hasn’t turned anything up… maybe this will.”

“Has she mentioned the names of her other aliases?” 

“No,” she says. “But they have certain characteristics, and maybe she mentioned people to you, or maybe you’ll recognize them from a crime.”

Sherlock rolls his shoulders back, one hand drifting to touch the shoulder that she once stitched up. “It’s worth the effort, I suppose, though I don’t know if we’ll get very far. Where would you like to begin?”

“There is a German woman,” Joan says immediately. “Confident, haughty, but in a gentler way than Moriarty. It’s like… it’s like Moriarty has a sense of superiority, but the German woman is just very at ease and knows that she belongs wherever she is.”

Sherlock closes his eyes and waves at her to continue. Joan purses her lips. “And Moriarty implied that the two constants between her characters are that they all love art and they all play Go. The German woman taught herself how to play, because chess was boring.” Joan thinks about what she said and reaches out to grab Sherlock’s arm. “Sherlock. That’s what Moriarty said today.”

“She told you the German woman taught herself?” he asks, not opening his eyes.

“No,” she says. “She said that she finds chess too rigid, and that she likes Go because it has more opportunities.”

“So you think Moriarty taught herself Go.”

“I think it’s worth making note when the stories match,” she says. “She probably gave parts of her real self to each of her characters, and if we can create a composite…”

“Then we may be able to find out who she really is.”

“Which could completely undermine her empire.”

Sherlock opens his eyes, finally, and stares at her. Joan holds his gaze. “I shall start going through my files,” he says.

“I’ll contact DI Hopkins, see if he has any cases in London that match her description,” she says.

“I believe I still have some friends in the Berliner Polizei. I shall contact them as well.”

******  
Three weeks later, they find Isadora Klein, a beautiful black widow who married men and women, all of whom mysteriously died.

“There are several descriptions for her,” the German police officer, Fritz von Waldbaum, tells them over Skype, looking uncertainly down at his file. “But one of them matches your woman, ja.”

“A ring of Isadora Kleins,” Joan says, amazed. “It’s brilliant. You build up the name, make it desirous, and once you’ve accomplished what you want, you pass it on to someone else and reap the benefits.”

“So she originated the role,” Sherlock says, looking at the blurry photos von Waldbaum emailed to them.

“It appears that way, sir,” von Waldbaum says. “Our first reports of Isadora Klein date back to the mid- 2000s, if that helps your investigation at all.”

Sherlock flips a few sheets of paper. “Isadora Andrevic married Hans Klein, a wealthy man in corporate agriculture, in 2007. Three months into their marriage, Hans Klein became ill and died four months to the day after they married,” he says, handing the file over to her. Joan flips to the next page.

“She remarried almost a year later to an attaché to Rome,” Joan reads, “who died three weeks after their marriage. Mugging gone wrong. And then married, nine months later, a member of English Parliament.”

“After that,” von Waldbaum says, his picture flickering over the Skype connection, “you’ll note that her description changes. Instead of a tall, thin blonde, she’s described as a small brunette woman. The change in hair colour can perhaps be accounted for, but-”

“But disguising ones’ height,” Sherlock interrupts, “takes a great deal of effort, and would be almost impossible to do for a lengthy period of courtship and a short marriage.”

“Yes, Mr. Holmes. That is what we in Berlin believe.”

“Isadora Andrevic. The initials are the same as Irene’s.” She looks at von Waldbaum. “Where is Isadora Klein- the current Isadora Klein- now?”

Von Waldbaum shuffles through some papers. “She was last seen at a villa in Tuscany two years ago. No one has heard from her since. She has given us no trouble at all, and given the timing, it is unsurprising. If I were to speculate, I would say the current Isadora Klein is finally free to be whoever she was before, with Moriarty behind bars.”

Sherlock nods, and Joan looks back at the grainy image of a blonde woman standing on a balcony. 

******  
She doesn’t sleep for the next two days. She stares at her ceiling, examining the crack, and thinks about Isadora Klein and the other unnamed, undiscovered women Moriarty plays. About the slow trickle of names, and her certainty that there is a reason Moriarty’s giving them to her, and her inability to do anything about it except arrest them just as Moriarty intends. She thinks about Moriarty’s calm confidence, and her control, and her command of the room.

On the third night, she gets up and goes down to Sherlock’s room.

“I’m going to tell her we know about Isadora Klein,” she says.

Sherlock, who is lying face down on his sofa, twists and looks at her. “ _Why?_ ”

It’s difficult to explain her rationale, as bound up as it is in her games with Moriarty, and she doesn’t think she could make clear about territory and influence, and the balance between the two on the board, and how Joan has been holding territory but none of the influence.

So instead she says, “Because I want to see what she’ll do. I want to see what she’ll give up when she’s surprised.”

******  
“Isadora Klein,” Joan says, and Moriarty’s hand falters, for just a moment. Then she deftly puts her stone down and smiles at her.

“Oh, very clever, Ms. Watson.”

Her smile is oddly lacking in teeth.

It makes Joan far more nervous than her scheming smile.

******  
Joan is home alone, pouring over files that Hopkins has sent over from Scotland Yard, when she hears the lock turn in the front door. She nearly disregards it, but then remembers, with sudden clarity, that Sherlock was going to a meeting with Randy for a few hours, and it’s only been half an hour since he left.

She’s on her feet before she even thinks about it, texting blindly into her phone what she hopes is an SOS to Sherlock, trying to see if she has anything that can be weaponized within reach. There isn’t much. An Xacto knife and a couple of tennis balls.

Joan scoops them all up and shoves herself behind the armchair by the fireplace. She thinks Sherlock would probably scold her for limiting her escape routes, but he isn’t here, and she just wants something solid at her back and for whoever is in their flat to be unable to come up behind her. She switches her phone to silent and waits.

She hears the inside door open slowly, the glass rattling softly in the panes. The footsteps are soft, but she can still hear them. She can feel them through the floorboards.

Her phone lights up and she glances down at it.

_Plc on wy. B thr sn._

She bites her lip. Sherlock and the police may be on their way, but they won’t arrive soon enough. The intruder is in the house, only half a wall away. She tightens her grip on the Xacto knife.

When the intruder walks in, she’s almost surprised. It’s a teenager, a scrawny looking girl who is probably still in high school. Joan’s pretty sure she’s never seen her before, so she probably isn’t one of Sherlock’s unofficial force. Her cheeks are pink from the winter winds, and her coat is too small. A runaway, maybe.

She’s holding a piece of paper in her gloved hands. She glances around her, and Joan shrinks back. She’s pretty sure she can’t stab a child, even if they try to kill her first.

The girl walks through the living room and into the lock room, where she pauses for only a moment. Then she walks into the computer area and stops in front of Sherlock’s computer. Joan can see the girl lick her lips, and then she wheels around, looking at Joan’s desk.

Joan tries to remember if there is anything important there. A few files, she thinks, from their latest case. Nothing that a high school girl could be involved with, even if Joan thought that she was there about the current case.

The girl reaches into the pocket of her too-small coat and pulls out a second piece of paper, this one somewhat crumbled. She licks her lips again, glances down at a cheap plastic watch on her wrist, and then drops the note on top of Joan’s papers. She hesitates for only a second, and then, with a sudden burst of energy, runs back through the rooms, past Joan, and out the door.

Joan considers going to see what the note says, but stays put. Moriarty has used snipers in the past. There are too many windows that someone could be watching through.

Five minutes later, the door slams back inwards, and Marcus bursts through, his gun pointed at an invisible enemy. Joan still doesn’t move, clutching the Xacto knife against her chest.

“Joan?” Marcus calls, a team of police officers behind him. “You here? Joan?”

“Here,” Joan calls quietly, stunned at how small her voice sounds.

Marcus makes a hand sign at the police officers behind him and then holsters his weapon, making a bee line for her, crouching down to her level. “Are you all right?” he asks, scanning her, putting one hand on her knee. The touch is reassuring, grounding.

“I’m fine,” she says, and clears her throat. “The intruder was a teenage girl. White. Dirty blonde hair, her coat was too small. Dark blue. Maybe five foot five, five foot six. She had a scar on her neck, and freckles, and-”

“Hey,” Marcus says gently, reaching out and carefully plucking the Xacto knife from her hands. “Hey, you’re okay. We can wait on the description.”

“She was here just five minutes ago,” Joan insists. “She might still be nearby.”

“Okay,” Marcus says immediately. He squeezes her knee, then stands up and waves over a police officer. Joan hasn’t met her before, she doesn’t know her name. “Detective MacDonald, gather up the others and canvass the neighbourhood. We’re looking for a white high school girl, dirty blonde hair, freckles, scar on her neck. Maybe five foot five or six, wearing a dark blue coat that’s too small for her.”

“Gotcha,” the police officer says, and gives Joan a quick, supportive smile before shouting for the other officers in the house. Joan doesn’t move from her spot behind the chair. She doesn’t know why. She presses back a bit further and feels the bite of the bookshelves in her lower back.

She knows the moment Sherlock arrives. Marcus is sitting on the floor in front of the chair that she’s still tucked behind, on his phone with Captain Gregson, right hand a comforting weight on her ankle, when the door bursts open for a second time and Sherlock’s reassuring bellow of “Watson!” rings out through the brownstone.

“I’m okay, Sherlock,” she calls, still not moving. She can’t get her legs to work.

Sherlock appears in the arch, eyes wild. “Are you all right? Are you harmed?”

“I’m okay,” she repeats. “It was a high schooler.” She sees him falter and adds, “She wasn’t one of yours.”

“One of yours?” Marcus asks, raising an eyebrow. “Do I even want to know?”

“Not progeny, Detective Bell,” Sherlock says, walking over. His hands are clenched into fists. She wonders what it’s costing him to stay still, to not go flying out of the house in pursuit of a teenage girl who looked like she needed a few decent meals. “Young detectives. Eager minds.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to know,” Marcus decides, and stands up from where’s been sitting, grunting as he does so. “Joan, I’m gonna go check in with Detective MacDonald, see where we’re at.”

“Detective MacDonald is here?” Sherlock asks, plopping down where Marcus was just sitting. Joan still doesn’t move. “Good. Other than yourself, Detective Bell, she is the best at processing crime scenes.”

“Is this even a crime scene?” Joan asks, and immediately regrets it. It’s a stupid question. The look Sherlock gives her says the same thing.

“The young woman broke into our home, Watson.”

“She had a key,” Joan tells him, remembering the quiet _snick_ of the lock and the lack of lock picking tools.

“I’ll call the locksmith tomorrow,” Sherlock says. “Our locks will be replaced by tomorrow evening.”

“Sherlock,” Joan says, “she left a note. On my desk.”

Sherlock leaps up, and Marcus immediately moves to stand where he was just sitting. She watches Sherlock stop in front of her desk, staring intently down at the carefully crumbled note on her papers. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pair of blue gloves.

“She was wearing gloves,” Joan calls out, trying to force herself to stand up, to get out from behind the chair. She gets as far as a crouch before she halts again. “Black. She wouldn’t have left any fingerprints, but there might be some fibers.”

“There may be fingerprints from whoever wrote it,” Sherlock says, lifting the note up and unfolding it gently. He reads the words, and even from two rooms away, Joan can see him purse his lips. “Or not.”

That, more than anything, forces her to her feet. Marcus turns and looks at her, and then moves aside so she can walk into the computer room. Her heels sound too loud on the floor. “What does it say?” she asks, moving to stand behind Sherlock.

He turns and extends the note. “You won’t need gloves,” he tells her, and she takes the note.

_I just wanted to let you know how easy it is._

“Moriarty,” Joan says.

“Moriarty,” Sherlock agrees. He brushes past her, his hand catching her wrist for just a moment before he slides by. “Detective Bell, this note was from Moriarty. I suspect she arranged for the remains of her organization to deliver it.”

“You think she’s employing kids now?” Marcus asks, sounding doubtful.

“No,” Joan says, going to stand next to Sherlock. “At least, not full time. That kid was probably just told to do a job, offered some money by a stranger to do a favour.”

“I agree,” Sherlock says, nodding. “Even if you find the girl, it’s unlikely that she will be able to tell you anything about the person who paid her. Which means we will be unable to find them, and thus discover how Moriarty is able to run her empire from within prison.”

“You think she’s running it, and it’s not just someone standing in for her, or taking over?”

“Detective, look at the note!” Sherlock says, thrusting it at Marcus. “Watson here discovered some information about Moriarty that she likely did not want us to know. And now, only a week later, someone breaks into our home-”

“Goes directly to my desk,” Joan interrupts.

Sherlock nods. “- goes directly to Watson’s desk, and leaves a vague but menacing note. It’s meant to be a deliberate reconstruction of Isaac Proctor’s actions when Moriarty was staying with us. It is clear, utterly clear, that Moriarty is almost entirely in control of her organization.”

“Which we suspected all along,” she adds.

“At any rate,” Sherlock says, as Marcus takes the note, “the handwriting is Moriarty’s.”

Marcus lets out an explosive breath, looking at the note. Joan doesn’t know Moriarty’s handwriting, is pretty sure she’s only seen it in glimpses, when she glanced over the letters Moriarty used to send him, but she trusts that Sherlock remembers. There were twenty seven letters from the woman. She highly doubts that Sherlock will ever forget her particular style. “Okay,” Marcus says. “I’ll call over to Newgate, see if I can get a log of Moriarty’s visitors so we can start narrowing down who’s still an active agent, and see if she’s been sending out messages in newspapers. In the meantime, I’m leaving uniforms outside your house. Don’t even think of objecting.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Sherlock says. “Thank you, Detective Bell, for your timely response.”

Joan nods. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Marcus gives her a small smile. “Not a problem, Joan. Have a good night, you two.”

Sherlock sees him to the door. Joan glances around the room and takes a seat in the chair she hid behind. She’s suddenly exhausted. She realizes, belatedly, that she’s still clutching a tennis ball in her left hand.

“Are you all right?” Sherlock asks, walking over and standing in front of her.

“I told you, Sherlock, I’m fine,” she says.

He gives her a suspicious look, but doesn’t pursue it. Joan is thankful for that. She’s really not fine, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. She wants to finish up with her files, and then she wants to take a bath. Maybe a bubble bath, if Sherlock hasn’t used it all in his latest chemistry experiment. 

“If you should need anything tonight, I will be staying in this room tonight.”

“That isn’t necessary.”

“Nonetheless.”

She nods tiredly and, with deliberate effort, drops the tennis ball on the ground. “I’m going to go take a bath,” she says. “I’ll talk to you in the morning. Don’t worry about the files- I’ll put them away tomorrow.”

“Very well, Watson,” Sherlock says softly, extending a hand to help her up. She takes it gratefully. “Sleep well.”

In the bath, she squeezes her eyes shut until the urge to cry passes.

******  
She wakes up the next morning feeling calmer. She lies in bed for a while, staring up at her ceiling, at the long, jagged crack that she’s memorized over the past two years. Her blankets are soft and warm, and part of her just wants to curl up and go back to sleep.

She gets up and gets dressed. She needs to put the files from Hopkins away. If they’re still there when Ms. Hudson arrives, she’s pretty sure she’ll have to endure a mild, if scathing, lecture. Besides, she tries not to add to Ms. Hudson’s work whenever possible. Sherlock makes things hard enough.

Sherlock is sleeping on the sofa, an arm thrown over his eyes. Joan smiles and walks as quietly as she can over to the piles she left on the floor last night. She sits down on the floor, folding her legs into a pretzel, and begins the lengthy process of putting them back in order and straightening them.

A few minutes later, she hears Sherlock grunt. “Good morning,” she says, looking at a page from the Fournaye file.

“Is it?” Sherlock groans, and rolls over to tumble onto the floor next to him. She offers him a bright smile. Her cheerfulness on mornings when he’s slept poorly, or not at all, tends to grate on his nerves, and she takes advantage of it whenever she can to make up for all the mornings he wakes her up before she’s ready.

“It is,” she says. “Get up. You said you were going to call the locksmith. And you should probably make some coffee for the uniforms outside. They could use it.”

Sherlock grunts again, but he gets up and heads downstairs. She flips to another page within the Fournaye file, frowning. That can’t be right.

When Sherlock comes back up, ten minutes later and carrying four cups of coffee, she has spread the file around her. He walks by her, setting a mug of coffee next to her, and then heads out the front door. She hears some muffled thanks, and then Sherlock is next to her again, blowing on his own coffee and looking down at her. 

“Sherlock,” she says slowly.

“Yes, Watson?” he asks. “I did remember your sugar.”

“Not that. In 2009, some documents on military operations in Afghanistan disappeared from the Defense Secretary’s home. A member of his domestic staff, someone named Hope Trelawney, was initially accused, but later all charges were dropped,” Joan says, pulling out the relevant papers and handing them up to Sherlock. 

“Hmm. Yes. All right.”

“The charges were dropped,” Joan continues, “because it was discovered that a man named Henri Fournaye, a member of France’s ambassadorial staff and a vocal anti-war advocate, had arranged for the theft of the plans. He was blackmailing Ms. Trelawney, who snuck the plans out, and because of the nature of her involvement, they let her go.”

“Go on.”

“Henri Fournaye was killed during a domestic dispute before he could be tried for espionage, though. His valet, Gilles Mitton, shot him in the heart. He was sentenced to life in prison.”

“This is all very fascinating, Watson, but-”

“Henri Fournaye was married,” Joan interrupts, standing up and shoving some of the papers at him. “Her name was Irène Fournaye. Look at her description.”

He starts reading. Joan knows what he’ll find. A tall, aristocratic blonde woman. A bit of a recluse, rarely attended diplomatic events. Had a number of visitors to their home in London. There are no photos of her in the file.

“You think this is Moriarty,” he says. He doesn’t sound like he’s doubting her.

“I think it fits,” Joan says, taking the papers back and tucking them into the folders. “A high profile crime involving multiple countries and diplomatic relations. Trelawney could have been an agent of hers. So could Mitton.”

“It’s a stretch,” Sherlock says, but he still doesn’t sound discouraging. He sounds intrigued, and Joan takes it as an invitation.

“It came out that Henri Fournaye arranged for the theft of the plans, right?” she asks. “Maybe it wasn’t Henri Fournaye. Maybe it was Irène Fournaye, but she used her husband’s name. Moriarty’s done that before, used a presumption of maleness to her advantage. As Henri Fournaye, she blackmailed Hope Trelawney. As Henri Fournaye, she received the information about planned military operations. And then, when the documents were discovered missing, Irène Fournaye arranged for Gilles Mitton to kill Henri in order to cover up her involvement. A dead man can’t expose someone, can they?”

“There is no proof,” Sherlock says, and Joan draws herself upright, ready to argue, but Sherlock raises his hands. “I’m- I’m not disagreeing with you, Watson. On the contrary, I rather suspect your version of events is the correct one. But we must concede that there is no proof.”

Joan glances at her watch. It’s early, too early to show up at Newgate. “She does have tells,” she says, dropping the files back in their box and shoving the lid on. “I mention the name Irène Fournaye, she may give something away. If she does, it’s only a matter of tracking down Hope Trelawney and talking to her. I’ll go see Moriarty later, and-”

“I don’t want you to tell her,” Sherlock blurts. Joan turns and looks at him. He is very deliberately not looking at her, instead staring down into his coffee mug.

“Sherlock, this could be helpful. Tracing her old crimes means we can trace her old partners, some of which might not be old partners. They might be current.”

“She could have killed you last night,” he says. 

“Sherlock-”

“No,” he says loudly. “No, Watson. You want to give her a name that you’ve found when the last time you did that, she made it perfectly clear that she can have you killed. You- you wanted to know what she’ll do? Now you know. There is no need to repeat the experiment.”

“I know what I’m doing,” she says, allowing some of the irritation she’s feeling to creep into her voice.

“You could have been killed!” he erupts, slamming his coffee mug down onto the table and running his hands back and forth over his head.

“You think I don’t understand that?” she shouts back. She storms over to him, nearly knocking over her untouched coffee. “I was alone, Sherlock, and all I had was an Xacto knife and some tennis balls, okay? I _know_ I could have been killed. I was the one here, not you.”

Sherlock stares down at her, sucking in his cheeks. Abruptly, he turns and walks away, heading down the stairs. “I need tea,” he says.

She sighs in frustration and follows him. “I know you don’t like to think about it,” she says, walking swiftly down the stairs. “I know you don’t like the idea that I could get hurt. But it’s my choice.”

“I heard you last night,” he says, yanking the cupboard doors open. He pauses and leans his head against the shelves, taking a deep breath. “You were upset.”

“Of course I was upset! I’m still upset, I’m going to be upset for a little while. But I told her about Isadora Klein because I wanted to see if she would let something slip, and she did. Now we have proof, real proof that she isn’t as inactive as we hoped.”

“Proof because she sent an assassin after you.”

“A high school girl is not an assassin,” Joan says, rolling her eyes.

“She could have been. It could be next time.” Sherlock slams the kettle onto the stove and whirls around. “At any point, Watson, it could be an assassin. If you get too close, she will not hesitate to kill you.”

She sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “You know what, Sherlock? I get it. I get that you’re not exactly eager to deal with her again. But I seem to recall someone telling me once that a good detective doesn’t just stop because things got inconvenient.”

“This isn’t a case, Watson. This is a crusade,” he says softly. 

“It was your crusade first,” she replies, just as softly. The point lands. He deflates, shoulders sloping in toward his chest.

They don’t speak for the rest of the morning.

******  
In the afternoon, while sitting in her bedroom and looking over the Fournaye files again, she hears the doorbell ring. She frowns and takes off her glasses. Sherlock had gone to pick up Chinese food earlier, so it isn’t take out, and she knows Alfredo is at a meeting tonight. She and Marcus were texting earlier, and it sounded like he was going to be going out with his brother, not swinging by the brownstone. She runs through her list of possibilities in her head and, when she can’t come up with anyone, swings herself off her bed and heads down the stairs.

“Hey Ms. J!” Janae says, waving at her as she turns the corner and walks into the parlour. Joan raises her eyebrows. Janae isn’t alone, either. Teddy is standing behind her, listening to his iPod, and Billy- a Latino boy that sometimes stays in the same homeless shelter as Janae, and who has helped out with surveillance a few times- is sitting on an ottoman.

“Hi, guys,” she says, forcing a smile onto her face. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you think, Watson?” Sherlock asks, walking in behind her with a tray full of mugs. She can smell hot chocolate. “They are here to assist in finding our high school assassin.”

“She wasn’t an assassin, Sherlock,” Joan says, exasperated. She turns back to the unofficial force. “Seriously, guys, you don’t need to be here. Drink your hot chocolate, and then I’ll give you some cab fare.”

“Sorry, Ms. J, no can do,” Janae says, taking a mug off Sherlock’s tray and handing it to Billy. “Mr. H says you could have been killed, and between the three of us, we can find the girl.”

Joan glares at Sherlock. “She wasn’t here to kill me. She’s not a threat.”

“This time, anyway,” Sherlock says calmly. “Think of it like this, Watson: she is a witness with vital information as to Moriarty’s crimes. The unofficial force will simply assist us in finding the young woman while we are otherwise engaged.”

She rubs her forehead. She doesn’t want to get the Irregulars involved in this. Any of them, child or adult. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“We done good work before, right?” Teddy asks, pulling off his headphones. “Hey, Holmes, where’s the whip cream? Don’t stiff us, man.”

Sherlock dutifully wanders back down to the kitchen, leaving Joan alone with them. She shakes her head. “It isn’t a question of the quality of your work- the three of you have been very helpful in the past. But it’s different, now, and-”

“It’s different because it’s you,” Billy says softly. “You would let us if it were someone else in trouble.”

Joan looks at Billy. She’s never gotten the full story on him, but she knows he stays at the homeless shelter from time to time with his mom, his dad, and three little brothers. According to Janae, they used to live in a nice neighbourhood, but Billy’s dad got injured at his job, and then fired, and they haven’t recovered since. Sometimes they have enough to rent an apartment for a while, but sometimes they’re back at the homeless shelter. Billy doesn’t talk much, as a general rule, so Joan makes a point of listening very carefully when he does.

“No, I wouldn’t,” she says gently. “It’s one thing for you to let us know when something bad happens and you see it. It’s a different thing entirely to send you looking for trouble.”

Billy frowns, and then smiles shyly. “You said she wasn’t a threat. So it isn’t trouble we’ll be looking for. Just a girl.”

Teddy lets out a hoot of laughter. “Got her dead to rights, man. C’mon, Ms. Watson, you can’t argue with Billy, can you? You know he’s right.”

“We won’t do anything dangerous, Ms. J, promise,” Janae says earnestly. “Just look for her, find out where she’s staying. Then we’ll let you know. See? No trouble at all.”

She wants to tell them no. Getting children involved is something Moriarty does, not her. But Joan is also aware that even if she says no, Janae and the others will simply go off and find the girl anyway, and this time without anyone knowing that they’re doing it. She wants to kick Sherlock for telling them anything. She might, later.

“Fine,” she says finally. “But you don’t approach her on your own. You come get me or Sherlock, okay?”

All three of them nod, and Joan sighs. She hates this.

When she’s sent them off, cab fare in hand and more hot chocolate in some thermos’s she dug up and scrubbed clean, she rounds on Sherlock and shoves a finger in his face. “Don’t you _ever_ involve them in anything related to Moriarty again, do you hear me?”

Sherlock looks at her, wide-eyed. “But Watson-”

“They are _children_. And we both know Moriarty won’t care if they get hurt or killed in the crossfire. Never again, Sherlock. You don’t call them again without asking me first.”

“I- Watson-”

“I need to go get ready to see Moriarty,” she say stiffly. “We’ll talk later.”

When she reaches her bedroom, she closes the door and rests her forehead against it. She doesn’t know what to do.

******  
Joan sets her stone on the board and starts picking up Moriarty’s pieces.

“You’ve gotten better,” Moriarty says approvingly, quickly putting down a white stone. 

Joan deposits the white stones in Moriarty’s cup. She hasn’t brought up the intruder, or the note. Moriarty’s smiles are a little sharper today, a little more smug, and it’s confirmation enough for her.

She hasn’t brought up Irène Fournaye yet either.

“I pass,” she says, looking the board over. “Nowhere else for me to go.” 

“There are plenty of open spots on the board,” Moriarty points out, tapping various empty points. Her nails are manicured, she notices. She wouldn’t expect manicures in prison.

“Seki,” she says, pulling out some of her stones and spreading them in front of her. “Mutual life. It’s better than death.”

“That depends,” Moriarty says, putting down a stone and collecting some of Joan’s pieces, “on whose death it is.”

“Are you saying, then, that your approach to life and death is to choose death?” she asks, passing once more with a wave of her hands.

Moriarty puts down another piece, sweeping up more of her pieces. “I’m saying,” she says, “that seki doesn’t win you the game.”

“And you play to win,” Joan says quietly.

“My dear Watson,” Moriarty says, finally passing and beginning the counting of the points, “who doesn’t? It is a zero sum game, you see.”

Joan smiles at her and stands up, gesturing to the guard. She doesn’t mention Irène Fournaye. “You win,” she says, and gathers up the game board. She turns and heads for the door.

“I always do, Joan,” Moriarty says behind her. “You’d do well to remember that.”

******  
When Joan gets home, the wall of crazy is back.

The index card is still in the middle, and there are still articles from newspapers and websites layered on the wall. The difference is that there are other names, too- _Irene Adler_ is written in pink ink on a post-it note, while _Irène Fornaye_ and _Isadora Klein_ are on opposite sides. There is a picture of Kayden with a question mark over it above the names. Yarn connects all of them to the central name.

Sherlock is standing in front of it, bouncing on his toes, his left hand covering his mouth. “The wall of crazy is back, I see,” Joan says, coming to a halt behind him.

“I removed the Napoleon picture,” he replies. 

“I see that,” she says, smiling. “Why did you put it back up? I thought you didn’t want to get involved with Moriarty again.”

Sherlock nods, eyes darting around and landing on nothing. “Y-yes, that is true. But it occurred to me, Watson, that you supported me when I first became obsessed with the mystery of Moriarty. And then it occurred to me that I should, perhaps, support you, now.” He angles his neck so that he’s looking at her, his face solemn and eyes wide. “It is the least I can do.”

Joan smiles at him, slowly. “I’m glad,” she says. “I don’t think I could do this without you.”

He immediately scoffs and looks back at the wall, folding his arms over his chest. “Nonsense, Watson. You defeated her once without my assistance; I am absolutely certain you can do it again. I’m afraid that when it comes to Moriarty, I am compromised.”

“I didn’t get a name today,” she tells him, turning so that their shoulders are almost touching, looking at the wall. “But I didn’t stay for one.”

“You decided that you had already earned the day’s name, hmm? With your knowledge of Irène Fornaye?”

“Yeah,” Joan agrees.

“Are you concerned that she’ll work out why you didn’t wait for your name?”

She thinks about it for a bit, and then shakes her head slowly. “She’s more likely to think I’m upset about the girl breaking in. At worst, she figures out that I know something. But as you pointed out, we don’t have any actual evidence about Irène Fornaye, so we can’t do anything about it. She can’t figure out that we know if we don’t do anything with the knowledge.”

Sherlock drops his hands back down to his sides and taps his fingers against his leg. “I took the liberty of contacting Hopkins about Hope Trelawney. He’s going to find her and interview her for you.”

“Thanks,” Joan says. She looks at the wall for a moment more, looks at the yarn and the thumbtacks and the pages and pages of ink, and then shakes her head slowly. “What do you want for lunch today?”

******  
“She’s lying,” she says.

Sherlock handed her the transcript from Hopkins only twenty minutes ago, but even a swift read of the interview between Hope Trelawney and DI Hopkins can show her exactly what the detective missed. Hope Trelawney was lying.

Sherlock looks up from where he’s doing something with RC cars (he went on about their merits for almost an hour yesterday, but Joan refuses to ask) and furrows his brow. “Who is lying?”

She waves the papers around. “Hope Trelawney. In her interview with DI Hopkins. She’s lying.”

He hesitates over his toys for a heartbeat, but then stands up and walks over, leaning his hip against her desk and peering over her shoulder. “What makes you think she’s lying?”

Joan purses her lips. It isn’t anything she can point to in particular. Hope Trelawney has the perfect story of the man who discovered that she was stealing from her employers and blackmailed her into swiping the documents off his desk. It’s air tight, every nuance perfect. She plays it all splendidly, and Joan is absolutely certain that it’s all a lie.

“It isn’t one thing,” she tells him slowly. “It’s just a feeling.”

Sherlock hums under his breath. “Follow that feeling, Watson. Your instincts are good.”

“It’s like with Drew Gardner,” she says. “The story sounds almost rehearsed. Which, yeah, this happened in 2009, she’s probably told friends and family and police a thousand times what happened, but would your story still sound this polished six years later?” She thinks about it for a moment, and then passes the transcript up to Sherlock. “Hope Trelawney is the daughter of a miner from the north and a domestic servant from Leeds. She left school at sixteen and started working. I remember the work you had me do on British accents and dialects, but you know more about the nuances than I do- do those sound like her own words, or a script that she’s memorized?”

Sherlock reads the transcript slowly, his lips moving along with the words and trying out different accents (she hears, for just a moment, the Derry accent that Alistair was teaching him at one point, and pushes away the pang it give her) and dialects. She waits patiently. Linguistic analysis can be tricky, and of course it isn’t as though the working classes _can’t_ adopt the RP accent and speech patterns, but it seems odd to her.

“I can’t be certain without speaking to her myself,” he says finally, handing her back the transcript, “but in my opinion, you are correct. Those are not her words- that is a script she is carefully reciting. A poorly written script, too, if they did no research into Hope Trelawney’s background to determine how she would actually speak.”

Joan frowns. “We need to speak to her ourselves,” she determines.

Sherlock nods. “I’ll get it set up.”

Three days later, Hope Trelawney is staring at them nervously through a webcam. She’s a small, delicate woman, with thin, mousy brown hair and large brown eyes. Joan watches as she wrings her hands, hands with broad knuckles and short fingernails. Her hands are as indelicate as the rest of her looks fragile. It’s an interesting contrast.

“Ms. Trelawney,” Joan says politely, speaking up so the computer microphones pick her up.

Trelawney nods sharply, and then gives her a weak smile. “Sorry, Ms. Watson. Bit nervous. Never done this before, see.”

Hearing her speak just that sentence confirms everything Joan needs to know. The transcript from Hopkins had her saying _I had never been involved in something so destructive before_ and _stealing the silver is quite a different thing from stealing state secrets, I’m sure you understand_. Hope Trelawney, when nervous, doesn’t talk like that. And Hope Trelawney, when interviewed by the police or people associated with the police, gets nervous.

“I understand,” she says soothingly, offering back a calm smile. “Ms. Trelawney, I wanted to ask you about your most recent interview about the events of 2009.”

“’course,” Trelawney says, and sits up in her chair. She clears her throat. “In 2009, I was approached by a man-”

“Not that, Ms. Trelawney,” she says, cutting her off.

“Hope. Call me Hope,” Trelawney says, and then frowns. “You don’t want to hear the story, then?”

Joan shakes her head. “No, Hope. I want to know why you lied.”

The video quality isn’t outstanding, but Joan doesn’t think she’s imagining the way Hope goes still. She thinks that if she were in the room with Hope, she would see blood draining from her face. “’Scuse me?” Hope says, her tone strangled.

“Hope,” she says gently, “I can tell that you lied about what happened. Why don’t you go ahead and tell me the truth?”

“Told you the truth already. Not my fault if you don’t believe me,” she says.

“Hope-”

“No,” Hope interrupts. She stands up, and for just a moment, all Joan can see is her thin frame, and then her face is back, much closer to the screen this time. She looks absolutely terrified. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with, Ms. Watson. Like I said before, a man approached me, blackmailed me. That’s it. That’s how it happened. That’s all that happened. Nothing else.”

“Hope-” she tries again.

“Sorry to waste your time, Ms. Watson,” she says, voice shaking. “Don’t think I can help you out.” Then the screen goes blank, and drops her back to the home screen. She’s gone.

Joan doesn’t move for a long time. It’s confirmation, in its own way, but it isn’t what she was hoping for. Not really. It’s nothing definitive. She supposes that’s what she’s going to have to get used to working with, when it comes to Moriarty- shadows and secrets and never anything certain. She doesn’t like it, but she’ll make it work.

She has to. 

******  
“Your mind isn’t on the game,” Joan says, keeping her eyes on the board. Moriarty has been notably distant the entire session, barely paying attention to the stones she puts down.

“And yet I’m still winning,” she replies, smirking. “Even while distracted, I can beat you.”

“Not when it counts,” Joan says, picking up a few more pieces. 

“You know, our games have grown rather stagnant,” Moriarty says, switching topics abruptly, setting a stone down on the board. Joan curses in her head, watching as she loses a huge amount of territory in one fell swoop. “I was thinking we could bring a breath of fresh air into them.”

Joan raises her eyebrows. “Oh?”

“Bring Sherlock next time,” Moriarty says, resting her elbows on her table, linking her fingers together and resting her chin on her hands. “I do miss him so.”

“No,” she says immediately.

“Bring Sherlock next time,” Moriarty says again, ignoring her, “or I won’t give you any more names. And I do know how much you need those names.”

When Joan doesn’t say anything Moriarty laughs. “Did you think you were being subtle, my dear Joan? You positively reek of desperation. There is no other reason for you to keep coming. So bring Sherlock with you. I’m not asking for an unsupervised visit- just for him to join us while we play. Just once. That’s all I ask.”

“No,” Joan says again, thinking of Sherlock’s face years ago when he said _Victims of horrific abuse are often protective of their abusers; it doesn’t mean we should send them back for seconds_.

“Be reasonable,” she says. “I won’t even speak with him.”

Joan stands up, feeling sick. “I will never bring him with me, Moriarty. I want you to understand that. If you stop giving me names, then I will not come back, and then not only will you never see Sherlock again, you will never see _me_ again, and then you’ll have nothing. There is nothing you could say or do to make me even consider bringing Sherlock here. So I suggest you make a choice. You settle for my continued visits, or you choose to rot in your cell, alone, for the rest of your life. You have one minute.”

“You are quite protective of your partner.” Moriarty leans back in her chair, folding her hands in her lap. “Are you sleeping with him?”

Joan doesn’t bother answering that. “Forty-five seconds.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you were,” Moriarty muses, studying her manicured nails with manufactured nonchalance. “He truly is phenomenal in bed. There were many enjoyable aspects about my time with Sherlock, of course, but that certainly ranks high among them.”

She feels her gut clench and twist. “Thirty seconds,” she bites out, part of her wanting it to end so she doesn’t have to come back again.

“No, you’re far too professional to sleep with your work partner. I wonder what it is, this fierce desire to protect him from me. I have no intention of hurting him, you know. Quite the contrary.”

“Fifteen seconds.”

Moriarty looks up from her hands and stares at Joan. She stares back, not letting herself look away for even a moment. She will not budge on this.

“Five seconds,” she says, swallowing. “Four. Three. Two-”

“Godfrey Norton. A prosecutor that I’ve bribed many times,” Moriarty says. She leans forward again, offering Joan her most dazzling smile. “I learn so much, playing these games with you, Ms. Watson. I have improved my game exponentially. I would miss you, if you didn’t come back. Now please. Finish the game. I have so much more to learn.”

She takes a deep breath.

And then she sits.

******  
When they go to pick up Godfrey Norton, his apartment is empty. He doesn’t show up for work the next day. He disappears.

Joan wonders if Moriarty arranged that, or if there is another trouble spot in Moriarty’s organization. She wonders how Moriarty will react when she tells her.

She decides not to tell her.

******  
Joan wakes up in the morning to the sound of a text notification. Rubbing her eyes, she drags herself upright and grabs her phone, opening up the text from Janae.

_Coming by with Porlock and the others. Pancakes plz?_

She squints at it, wondering if she’s been picking up on Sherlock’s habit of cryptic texts. She rushes through her shower and dresses in a hurry- it usually takes Janae, Billy, and Teddy about thirty minutes to get to the brownstone, and she isn’t sure if they have all the ingredients for pancakes- and heads down to the kitchen.

Sherlock is already there, expertly cracking eggs.

“I take it Janae texted you, too?” she asks, nodding gratefully when he jerks his chin at the mug of tea he’s poured for her.

“She did indeed.”

“Any idea who or what Porlock is?” she asks, taking a sip of tea. The warmth sinks into her bones, a comforting feeling.

Sherlock glances at her over his shoulder. “I would imagine she’s our young housebreaker,” he says with a flourish of his spoon, which he’s using to stir the pancake batter. Joan doesn’t think she’s imagining chocolate chips stuck on the end of it. Apparently it’s to be a sugar filled breakfast.

“That was fast,” she says, impressed despite herself, and then she frowns. “They weren’t supposed to approach her, just find her and then get us.”

He turns back to the stove, carefully doling out batter into strange shapes in the pan. “One would be inclined to blame Teddy, but he follows Janae like a puppy, as much as he’ll deny it. I rather suspect it is your protégé that is shrugging off the yoke of orders.”

She sighs. She worried that they would do something like this. It’s why she never wanted them involved. “She’s not my protégé, she’s yours,” she corrects absently, and Sherlock makes an unflattering noise.

“She worships the ground you walk on, Watson. She merely uses me for access to explosives.”

Twenty minutes later, the doorbell buzzes, and Joan and Sherlock go up to greet everyone together. She refuses to admit that her heart is thudding in her chest because of a girl that looked like she was barely fifteen. She refuses to admit that part of her is terrified, because if she admits that, then she might as well give this all up.

Janae’s smiling face is the first thing Joan sees when Sherlock opens the door, and it’s a balm for her nerves. She can’t help but smile back, and when she looks past her she sees Teddy trying to look tough and Billy looking quietly pleased. And between Janae and the other Irregulars, there is a girl with dirty blonde hair, freckles, about five foot five or six, wearing a dark blue coat that is too small for her.

It’s the girl that broke into their house. 

The girl is staring down at the ground, chewing on her bottom lip. She looks awkward and nervous and vulnerable, and despite the anxiety swarming Joan’s stomach, part of her feels for the girl. She doesn’t know anything about who she is or why she agreed to break into the brownstone, but she looks scared, and Joan has seen that look on so many people connected to Moriarty now that she can’t help but want to reach out and tell her it’s all going to be okay.

“Hey Ms. J, Mr. H. We found her. Meet Porlock,” Janae says, cheerful as always.

Sherlock doesn’t miss a beat. “Come in, Ms. Porlock. And the rest of you; there are chocolate chip pancakes in the kitchen.”

Teddy brightens, losing his tough guy act almost immediately, and he shoves past Janae, Porlock, and Billy, practically running down the stairs. His enthusiasm shakes something loose in Joan, and she laughs, rolling her eyes. Teddy acts so much like an adult sometimes that she forgets that he’s only sixteen.

Janae chatters happily away at Joan as they walk downstairs, telling her about the latest Double Dutch escapades in her neighbourhood, Billy just behind her making encouraging noises. Joan pretends not to notice the way that Sherlock insinuates himself between herself and Porlock, who hasn’t said a word or even acknowledged them. 

Once they sit down at the table and Sherlock distributes the pancakes (made to look like various molecular structures, which he’s quizzing Janae about), Porlock breaks her silence long enough to say, “Thanks,” in a rough voice. Joan smiles at her, and she looks away again.

“Now then,” Sherlock says brusquely, dropping into a chair. “Ms. Porlock. Tell us how you came to break into our home last week.”

Porlock flinches, and then scowls. She looks like Teddy for a moment, playing tough. “He gave me fifty bucks to do it, and that’s good money. It wasn’t like he was asking me to hurt anyone, or even break anything. He gave me a key.”

“He?” Joan asks.

“Just some guy,” she says. “Tall, kind of ugly? I don’t know.”

“Tell them what you told us, Porlock,” Janae says around a mouthful of pancakes. Somehow it must come across as comforting, because Porlock relaxes a fraction, taking a deep breath.

“A bunch of us kind of live in this rundown building, and we’ve kind of got a reputation for running errands and stuff, things you don’t want written down anywhere. We’re not exactly, like, a known business or anything, but if you ask the right people, you can reach me and some of my friends. Last week, this guy walks into our place, and that’s weird, right? Because we haven’t heard anything about someone wanting our services. But he walks in, and he drops a fifty dollar bill on the table, and tells us that all we have to do to earn it is a drop off a piece of paper at this brownstone, he even has the key. Now, my friends don’t trust him, but I need that fifty, so I agree. He hands me the paper and the key, and that’s it, says that he’ll be in touch.”

It seems to tire her out, because she sits back and focuses on her pancakes. Teddy demands more, and Billy politely asks for more, so Sherlock goes back to the stove, leaving Joan to think.

It isn’t hard to see that anyone in the city who has any sort of involvement with crime would be someone Moriarty would keep an eye on. She isn’t sure which is worse, the idea of Moriarty having random children selected to play messenger, or Moriarty having kept careful tabs on people who would be perfect for that sort of task.

“He’s going to come back,” Janae says, interrupting Joan’s thoughts. She looks up.

“What?”

Janae sighs, impatient. “Porlock said the guy said he’ll be in touch. So he’s going to come back, right? Maybe Porlock could help you guys, tell you stuff about the dude.”

Joan opens her mouth to protest, and behind her, Sherlock starts to refuse as well, but Porlock looks up and says, “Yeah. Let me do that.”

“No,” Joan says firmly.

“I agree, Ms. Porlock. While we obviously employ children from time to time, we certainly do not allow them to interact with known criminals,” Sherlock agrees.

Janae and Teddy erupt at being called children, but she ignores them and looks at Porlock instead. She’s glaring at her.

“Look, he’s going to come back no matter what, right? I’m not saying I’m going to jump whenever he says jump, but maybe next time he’s around, I let you guys know, okay? Maybe I get a photo on my phone, or let you know what he wants me to do.”

“No,” Joan says again. She’s been saying it a lot lately. Porlock starts to talk again, but she throws a hand up and gestures swiftly. “Absolutely not. This discussion is over.” Her voice comes out sounding sharper than she wanted, and everyone falls silent.

The rest of breakfast is spent in quiet, but tense, conversation with the kids. Janae interrogates Sherlock about bases while Billy talks Teddy through some simple Spanish phrases. Joan watches Porlock; Porlock watches her pancakes.

“Come with me,” Joan says, standing up abruptly. Porlock’s head shoots up, a wary, distrustful look on her face. Janae glances over at her, and waves a hand.

“She’s cool, Porlock, don’t worry,” Janae says and then goes back to demanding that Sherlock show her how to deprotonate a molecule.

Joan still doesn’t fully understand the sway that Janae holds over everyone, but her words put Porlock back at ease, and she stands up to follow Joan after only a brief hesitation.

Joan leads her upstairs, back to her bedroom. She has a few tubs of clothes in the back of her closet, and she’s pretty sure she has a good, warm winter coat that she can pass on to Porlock. With the way that winter has been stretching into spring for the last few years, she needs something that will last for at least another two months, and her current coat looks like it should have been given up last year.

“Your name isn’t really Porlock,” Joan says, opening her closet and pulling out the first tub. Porlock sits on the edge of her bed, wrapping her arms around herself.

“What makes you think that?” she asks.

Joan twists, giving her a look over her shoulder. “Porlock? Nobody names their kid that, not even the worst parents.”

Porlock shrugs minutely. “It’s my last name. It’s British, I think.”

“What’s your first name?” Joan digs through the tub, cataloguing which clothes she should probably take to the homeless shelters she frequents later. Maybe she’ll send some of them with Janae. She’s roughly the same size as Janae’s mother, she thinks.

“Doesn’t matter,” Porlock says shortly. “I don’t use it anymore.”

“Why?”

“You ask a lot of questions, you know that?”

It’s sharp, and angry, and more than a little defensive. Joan finds the coat she’s looking for and stands up, shaking it out.

“Asking questions is part of my job. Did Janae tell you what Sherlock and I do?” she asks, and sits down next to Porlock, giving her a harder look. She’s too thin, with bruises peeking out of her sleeves on her pisiform, lunate, and scaphoid bones. She needs food, and a better place to live than some rundown building. Joan settles instead for pressing the coat into Porlock’s hands.

“I don’t need this. I have a coat,” Porlock mumbles, shifting uncomfortably.

“Your coat doesn’t fit, and it’s cold out. I haven’t worn this in over a year. Please, take it. Did Janae tell you what we do?” she asks again.

Porlock sighs. “You’re the good guys, or whatever.”

“Porlock, I don’t want you involved in this, okay?” she says gently.

“But I can help, I can-”

Joan shakes her head. “You don’t understand the person we’re up against,” she says, aware that she sounds like Hope Trelawney. “I’m sorry you got involved in the first place, but we can make sure your involvement stops there. Get out of that rundown building you stay at and go stay with Janae for a while. Hell, I can put you up in a hotel for a while if you’d prefer. But stay away from that man. Stay away from this case. Please. Stay away.” She doesn’t tell her about mopping up blood in the aftermath of Moriarty. She doesn’t tell her about stitching friends back together. She wants her to understand, but not so much that she scares her. She’s just a kid. 

“Who is this person?” Porlock asks.

“The bad guy,” she says simply. “A really bad one. Please, Porlock. Promise me you’ll get yourself out. Promise me that you won’t talk to this man who approached you. Promise me you’ll get somewhere safe.”

Porlock looks at her for a long moment, her hands twisting in the fur ruff around the hood of the coat. Joan watches as, slowly, her hands untwist and start smoothing the coat out.

“Yeah,” she says finally. “Yeah, okay.”

“You promise?” Joan asks.

Porlock nods, looking down at her lap. “I promise.”

The kids leave a little while later, Janae’s arm slung over Porlock’s shoulder, chattering happily. Joan watches as they get into a cab and drive away, her gut clenching.

“Are you all right?” Sherlock asks from behind her.

She watches the disappearing tail lights, still hearing Porlock’s laughter at one of Teddy’s jokes. 

“No,” she says shortly, and closes the door.

******  
“What case are you working on right now?” Moriarty asks, flipping a white stone between her fingers, back and forth. Joan watches for a moment, entranced, and then snaps her eyes back to the board. She’s trying a new approach today, opening with a low Chinese fuseki, and it seems to be working well.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” she says.

“Oh, Joan, of course it’s my business,” Moriarty smiles, leaning forward and folding her hands. “I happen to think there’s some hope for you as an investigator.”

Her throat goes dry. The words are familiar. Very familiar. She can practically feel the sticky, cracking plastic of the prison phone in her hand, can remember the exact shape of the cuts on Sherlock’s face. She swallows tightly and puts down another stone, capturing a number of pieces.

“Well, thank you,” she says, once she trusts her voice to remain firm. “Since I’m the one who put you here, I would think that you know first hand my skills as an investigator.”

“Are you learning a lot about me? Have you… solved me, yet?”

It’s a deliberate jab, and Joan considers ignoring it. She considers just examining the board, trying to find that balance between territory and influence that her mother always urged her towards. _You must find the balance between the two, Joan_ , her mother always told her. _Without balance, you will lose._

“You aren’t a real mystery, Moriarty,” she says, keeping her eyes fixed on the game. “Someone like you, they love to make themselves into an enigma, loves the idea of being mystifying and inexplicable. You aren’t hard to solve because you’re not a mystery. You’re not a puzzle, and you’re not a game.”

“Do you think?” Moriarty asks. She sounds amused. Her hand slides into Joan’s eye line and puts another stone on the board. “Go on.”

“You’re a person, Moriarty, for all that your name and your history are a lie. You’re a person, and people, when you actually see _them_ , not just yourself in their reflection- they aren’t actually that difficult to understand.”

“Oh, very good,” she says quietly. “That’s quite good, Ms. Watson. Keep going.”

Joan bites the inside of her cheek and looks up, glaring at Moriarty. She’s angry. She’s angry about Porlock, a child who had nothing to do with their game, and she can’t help but think of yet another child who should never have been involved in any of this. “Do you understand that you don’t actually love your daughter?”

Moriarty’s eyes flicker for just a moment, a hint of rage sliding into her calm façade. Joan knows that look intimately. It’s the look that first clued her into the fact that Kayden Fuller meant something to Moriarty. “I love my daughter very much,” she says, her voice even.

She shakes her head and puts her piece on the board, collecting the stones she trapped one at a time. “No, you don’t. You’re a narcissist. You love seeing yourself in Kayden, and you love controlling her, but you don’t love _her_. If you did, you would return her to her mother.”

“I’m her mother,” Moriarty spits out, slapping another stone down on the board hastily, without looking.

Joan slides her own stone in place, collecting a few more pieces. “You gave birth to her, but Mrs. Fuller raised her and loves her. Mrs. Fuller is more of her mother than you’ll ever be. You’re just the stranger who wrecked her life.”

She watches as Moriarty’s careful control slips again, her face going taut with fury. “I have enemies, Ms. Watson. Enemies that would kill her, given the chance. I am protecting her.”

“You’re protecting yourself,” Joan scoffs. “Protecting your assets, in case someone decides to follow Gaspar’s lead.” She leans forward, collecting half the board when she puts down her stone in a place that Moriarty failed to see. “Tell me where Kayden Fuller is, Moriarty. Let that little girl go home to her mother. Prove that you love her for more than what she represents for you.”

Moriarty stares down at the board, a muscle in her jaw jumping. Joan sees the moment she realizes she lost the game. “No. We’re done for the week. I’m done.”

Joan stands up, gathering the board, without pushing any further. “The name?” she asks.

Moriarty stares up at her, eyes cold. “John Garrideb,” she says, and suddenly she smiles, the shark smile that Joan hates. “You’ll have fun with him. I’m almost disappointed that I’ll miss it.”

“I’m sure you won’t actually miss a thing,” Joan says, and walks away.

******  
Four days later, they’ve solved ten previously unsolved murders, and Joan’s been shot for the first time.

It’s barely a graze, and it only required five stitches, but Sherlock hovers around her anxiously, looking pale and nervous. “Oh my god,” she says irritably, shoving his hands away when he tries to guide her down into a chair. “Stop it, Sherlock. I’m fine.”

“You were shot by Killer Evans,” Sherlock says primly. “He’s killed twenty-nine people, Watson. You will perhaps forgive me if I am concerned about you.”

“Concern, fine. Hovering? No. If you want to do something for me, go make me some tea,” she snaps, feeling bad about it as soon as she does. But her leg stings a little, and she’s spent the last three hours in a hospital, so she feels like she’s maybe justified.

“Of course,” he says, and disappears, his shoes clattering down the stairs to the kitchen. Joan sighs and drops her head back on the back of the chair, rubbing her eyes. She’s exhausted. They’ve been chasing Killer Evans, alias John Garrideb, for four days nonstop, without sleep. She just wants to go to bed.

Instead, she stands up and drifts over to the wall of crazy, wincing as she limps. John Garrideb’s name is up there, scribbled hastily on the back of a Chinese takeout receipt. Joan reaches up and takes it down. She digs out a blank post-it and carefully prints _James Winter_ , Killer Evans’ real name, then sticks it up on their wall. She grabs the red yarn from the ground and starts snipping off lengths.

By the time Sherlock brings her her tea, she’s gotten the names of the ten murder victims they managed to solve up on the wall, red yarn carefully connected to James Winter’s name. She’ll add the other nineteen names later. She accepts the mug he hands to her and steps back to look at her work.

“I think she’s getting information about me,” Joan tells Sherlock. “At our last meeting, she repeated something you said to me, back when we first met, verbatim. There’s no way she could have known what you said unless someone got her security footage.”

“Watson,” Sherlock says, “I think it is very likely that she’s targeting you.”

“I agree,” she says. “She also said, after she gave me the name, that I would have fun with him.”

“He was supposed to kill you.”

“Yeah, maybe.” She turns. “I brought up Kayden Fuller today. I think she’s been holding onto James Winter for a while, in case she needed a quick way to get rid of me.”

It’s a startling thought, but in some ways, Joan is almost resigned to it. She’s been meeting Moriarty every week for almost five months now, and she’s seen the way Moriarty looks at her. She’s seen the edged grins and the flinty eyes; she’s watched the rare and sudden twitch of the hand. Moriarty is more still than Sherlock; she’s a canvas, with every movement meant to be a brushstroke. But when she moves without thinking about it, it’s telling.

Moriarty loathes her.

“I think it is time to consider putting an end to your engagements with Moriarty,” he says. He steps around her and carefully attaches a long red string from James Winter to the central ‘Moriarty’ index card. “He was one of her assassins, and she set you up.”

She licks her lips slowly, shifting her weight onto her good leg. “I just- I hate to give up.” She doesn’t mention that they still haven’t found Kayden.

“Don’t think of it as giving up. Think of it as preserving your life.”

Joan huffs out an irritated breath and looks at him out of the corner of her eye. He’s very carefully not looking at her, his arms folded while he stares at their mutual wall of crazy. “Are you telling me that you would give up? Knowing that you’re clearly getting to her, somehow, and you’d just walk away at the first threat to your life?”

Sherlock purses his lips and juts his chin out, turning on his heel to stare down at her. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” she asks, incredulous. 

“I don’t know!” he says again, louder but not quite yelling. He rubs his face three times in quick succession and then sighs loudly. “I don’t know, Watson. Two years ago, even a year ago, I would have known the answer to that question. But now, working with you? The- the thought of hurting you, even by accident, even if it saved another person’s life, is… distasteful. So I don’t know. I might.”

Joan glares at him, biting the insides of her cheeks in frustration. It feels like quitting, to walk away from Moriarty when they’re learning more and more about her every day, when they find out more each meeting. With the addition of Killer Evans and his victims to their wall, she’s pretty sure they could trace some more of her crimes, put a few more to rest. They could use it as evidence to keep her in jail forever.

And she very much wants Moriarty to rot in prison.

“I’m going to bed,” she says abruptly. She turns away from the wall of crazy, not wanting to see all the threads, the links she put up there, the mysteries she solved. If she looks at it now, she’ll make her decision, and- and she needs to think.

“Watson…”

“Good night, Sherlock,” she says, and heads up the stairs.

******  
She thinks she understands now, the days that Sherlock spent staring at that wall. She thinks she understands his drive to find Moriarty. 

Because Moriarty has been found and is behind bars, but Joan is back at the prison, days early, simply because she can’t put it down.

She considered dropping it, after talking to Sherlock last night. But lying in her bed, her leg aching, all she could see was that maddening smirk, the look of devastation of Sherlock’s face when he explained about Irene and Moriarty, and the lives she’s found, the lives Moriarty ruined simply because she could. Kayden Fuller. It comes back to Kayden Fuller, every time.

Kayden Fuller is the only case she has added to the cold case trunk since she started working with Sherlock.

Joan hasn’t been a consulting detective for very long, but she’s always cared about people. And if she can see who Moriarty is, find her amidst all the aliases and lies, then maybe she can make sure that no one ever looks like Sherlock did, or bleeds out on the ground like Henri Fournaye, or is killed by assassins like the many victims of Moran and Killer Evans, or just disappears like a small girl who never deserved the hell that came from being associated with Moriarty. Moriarty has hurt too many people, and Joan believes in ending suffering.

“Joan,” Moriarty says, smiling and sitting down across from her. She doesn’t look surprised that Joan is there instead of splashed across the headlines as yet another murder victim. If Joan is reading her right, if she understands the small twist in her lips and the carefully folded fingers correctly, then Moriarty is actually pleased to see her.

“Moriarty,” she replies, neutral and calm. Her leg hurts. She ignores it.

“You didn’t bring the board.”

“That isn’t why I’m here.”

Moriarty’s smile warps, moving from her signature enigmatic smirk to something vicious. “Was my last lead not enough for you, darling? Or was he too much?” When Joan doesn’t reply, she leans back in her chair, tossing her head so that her hair swings back over her shoulder. “He was a dangerous man, James Winter. Most of my men are, you see, but he was something else. He was a rabid dog, Joan, and he needed to be put down.”

Joan leans forward, resting her hands on the table. “I’m curious. Was he supposed to kill me, or did you expect me to kill him?” 

Moriarty’s fingers twitch, a minute reaction, but Joan catalogues it. “Why would you think that?”

“Killing me is obvious,” Joan says. She thought about this all last night, carefully considered it when she wasn’t trying to decide whether or not to walk away from Moriarty forever. “It’s too obvious. You hate the obvious. You like impressionists.”

“Monet,” Moriarty agrees easily. She folds her hands in her lap.

“Me killing him, though. Making me a killer. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

It is Moriarty’s turn to remain silent. Joan watches her, trying to memorize every small twitch, every blink, every near invisible shiver of the skin. Finally, when she thinks she knows what she’s seeing, she stands up. “You nearly managed that trick with Sherlock, pushing him to stab Moran. You won’t manage it with me.”

She turns away, holding her chin high and refusing to limp, but Moriarty’s voice arrests her. She says, her voice warm and amused, “Joan, I don’t need to make you a killer. You already are one.”

She falters, but only for an instant.

******  
“You aren’t going to drop it, are you?” Sherlock asks when she walks in the door.

She shrugs off her coat and turns to face him. He’s standing halfway up the stairs, one foot bare, the other clad in an orange sock with lightning bolts on it. She bought him those socks. It was an anniversary gift. The anniversary of the day they met. She hadn’t thought he’d remember, but then he’d handed her a new scarf, Egyptian cotton, dark purple and black. It’s a fond memory. She has many good memories of Sherlock, little things that she tucks away for when he’s at his worst, when he’s lashing out at the people around him or being an inconsiderate dick, or for when he looks at her with huge, wounded eyes, explaining without words all the ways in which Moriarty hurt him.

“No,” she says finally.

His eyes dart across her face. He’s trying to read her, just like she was reading Moriarty just an hour ago. She holds still, watches his face, lets him.

“Very well,” he says, nodding. “Then you’ll need more information.”

He heads back up the stairs. Joan considers not following him, thinks about maybe making herself a salad instead, but decides that would be petty, and she is not the petty one in this partnership. She tugs off her shoes and then goes after him, socks on the stairs silent.

When she finds him, he’s on the third floor, in the room next to the television room. She doesn’t go in there often. It’s mostly full of furniture covered by dust cloths, with some closets where he stores his various odd collections. He’s digging through a cardboard box when she walks in, tossing some papers onto the ground. Joan walks over to the first one and crouches down, picking it up.

It’s a letter. She glances at Sherlock, but he’s still digging through the box, so she starts to read it. _My Dear Sherlock_ …

Joan stares at the letter, not sure what she’s seeing. She’s already seen the letters Moriarty wrote Sherlock. She’s read them all. She reads the letter quickly, and then looks back up at the top of the page. The date is recent. Far too recent.

“I thought you stopped corresponding after the Fuller case,” she says flatly.

“No,” he says, sounding almost apologetic. “The scientific insights alone-”

“Did you ever ask her about Kayden Fuller?” she interrupts, not caring about science. She doesn’t care about puzzles and games and _science_. There is a girl out there somewhere, and Joan has sat down with Moriarty for months, hoping to soften her up enough to find out where the girl has gone, hoping to find clues about the women she’s been and the crimes she’s committed. While her partner, apparently, carried on with his cheerful correspondence.

“I- no,” he admits.

The rush of anger is heady, and nearly blinds her. She crumbles the letter in her hand. “How many letters?” she asks, keeping her voice steady. It’s an effort, but she manages it. She always manages it.

She watches as he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “In addition to the original twenty-seven? She has written seventeen more.”

Joan studies the letter, stares at the looping cursive J that is nothing like her own signature, always more utilitarian. She studied handwriting analysis when she first began her partnership with Sherlock. Moriarty’s signature reveals confidence bordering on arrogance, creativity, and a sharp intellect. She thinks that, given how everything else about Moriarty is a construct, her signature was built to reveal just those details. It isn’t hard, ultimately, to craft a new signature.

“And you never even thought to bring up Kayden Fuller? Did you ever prod her for more information on her old crimes?” At his negative head shake, she throws the letter down on the table. “Were all of these letters,” she says, waving her hand at them, trying to keep herself from shaking in her rage, “just more monologues on how you’re both just so special, and how only you two can understand each other?”

Sherlock purses his lips and shakes his head. “No,” he says, but doesn’t elaborate.

She should be screaming at Sherlock for this violation of her trust, of their partnership, of everything they’ve built together these past two years. She should walk away from him, go stay with Ms. Hudson for a few days, or maybe Alfredo or Emily. She should make sure he knows that this, of all the things he’s done over the past two years, is the greatest betrayal, his biggest mistake. And he’s made so many, but this is… not all right. Her leg aches. She wonders if it wouldn’t, if she had known that Sherlock was still writing to Moriarty, if they had gone through him to find Kayden Fuller instead of her going to see Moriarty week after week.

She isn’t going to scream, though, as much as she wants to. Joan was a surgeon. She prides herself on her control, on her ability to only give away so much of herself, on her poker face. Screaming means she isn’t in control, and right now, she needs to be in control.

“You didn’t show me these,” she says carefully, tracing the loops of the letter.

“No,” Sherlock agrees, and she watches him sag with relief when she doesn’t yell. She pulls in a sharp breath, fighting against the rage building up behind her eyes.

“Why?” she asks. She’s pleased that her voice is still steady.

He shrugs ineloquently, an evasive gesture. He gathers up the last of the letters and hands them to her, his hands skimming hers. It’s deliberate, she knows. Normally, Sherlock avoids touching anyone, unless he needs something. “I did not think it was relevant.”

“You…” she pauses, reining in another flash of anger. “You didn’t think Moriarty writing you was important enough to tell your partner, the one who came up with the plan to catch her and is the reason she’s in prison now? The one who has had to sit down with her every week?”

“You’re angry,” Sherlock says, realization dawning across his face.

“I am so furious,” Joan replies quietly, “that seeing straight right now is a miracle.”

She tucks the letters into her pocket and very carefully walks away from him. If she stays, she’s going to yell, and that wouldn’t help either of them. So she lets herself walk away from him and goes back downstairs, tugging her shoes back on and putting on her coat. She hesitates for a moment over her choice of scarves but decides to take the one he gave her. She needs a good memory right now.

So she winds the scarf around her neck, checks to make sure the letters are still in her pocket, and walks out.

******  
“Oh, honey,” Ms. Hudson sighs when she opens the door, hair artfully tussled and jeans designer, even though she’s clearly just lounging in her apartment. “What did he do this time?”

Joan smiles up at Ms. Hudson, shrugging a shoulder. “Hid evidence from me. Evidence that happens to concern Moriarty.”

Ms. Hudson purses her lips and then grabs Joan, tugging her into her apartment. It’s immaculate, as always. Joan smiles when she puts her coat in the closet, admiring the way the coats are hung by colour. She used to live in a meticulously clean place. She misses it, sometimes, but she maintains her own order in the midst of Sherlock’s chaos, and it’s enough for her.

“I’m sorry about him,” Ms. Hudson says, carefully moving Joan’s coat to a different place in the closet. She presumes she was slightly off on the colour scheme. “I love him, I do, but he can be incredibly foolish sometimes.”

Joan nods, and pulls the letters out of her pocket. “Enough about him. Want to help me figure out Jamie Moriarty?”

Ms. Hudson raises her eyebrows. Joan wonders how she can manage to get them so even. “We have more letters now?”

“We do,” Joan confirms, handing her one of the letters and walking over to sit on her couch. It’s white, like most of Ms. Hudson’s furniture, and Joan always feels nervous sitting on it, but Ms. Hudson revealed one night, after they’d both had too much wine, that the couch had been stained by much worse than a little New York soot, and so she shouldn’t worry too much. It hadn’t exactly made Joan any more comfortable sitting on it, but she doesn’t stress as much about accidentally destroying an expensive piece of furniture. “Sherlock just gave these to me tonight.”

Ms. Hudson takes a deep breath and joins her on the couch, tucking her feet beneath Joan’s thigh. “Any chance these letters would have saved you a bullet hole?”

Joan rolls her eyes, shifting so that Ms. Hudson’s toes aren’t hitting the ticklish spot just underneath her knee. “I don’t have a bullet hole. It was just a graze.”

Ms. Hudson’s gaze sharpens, a scowl sliding on her face that Joan recognizes from whenever she discovers one of Sherlock’s experiments left to marinate. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t distinguish between the two. Either way, you were shot, and Sherlock could possibly have prevented it.”

She tamps down the fury again, touching the bundle of letters in her hand. “It doesn’t matter.” She holds up a hand before Ms. Hudson can protest. “It doesn’t. It’s done. But there are seventeen letters here, and they might possibly give us more hints as to who, exactly, Moriarty is.”

Ms. Hudson gives her a long look, but she finally nods, taking a second letter from Joan and scanning it. “And you still think Jamie Moriarty is an alias?”

Joan nods. “I do. I think she’d leave her original identity behind. Either to protect it, keep it separate from everything, or to disassociate from it entirely, I don’t know. But I don’t think she’d ever use her real identity for anything. I think she gave that up the first time she created an alias.”

They sit in silence for a while, reading through the letters. Joan notes the word choices, the rhythm of the sentences, the loops and swirls. She tries to put them together with what she knows about Moriarty already. 

“These are deeply manipulative letters,” Ms. Hudson says after maybe a quarter of an hour worth of reading. Joan looks up, and Ms. Hudson points. “They’re beautifully constructed, lovely reads, but the words themselves are deeply isolating. All these letters, they’re trying to remind Sherlock that she’s the only one who could ever understand him.”

She frowns, setting the letter she’s holding down. “Unsurprising. Do you think her goal is to continue the abuse in general, or to isolate him for a specific reason?” she asks, more to herself than to Ms. Hudson. She has, after all, never met Moriarty in any of her forms, and while she’s listened to Joan muse about her before, and has surely heard Sherlock speak of her, she doesn’t know her, not like they do.

Ms. Hudson is, as ever, surprising. “Is there a reason it has to be one or the other?” she asks, lifting her toes in order to get Joan’s attention. She looks over, and sees the solemn look at her face. “Moriarty seems like the sort of woman who enjoys causing pain for the sake of it, but usually has a dozen plots running at once. Isn’t it likely that this is both?”

Joan stares at her. She can’t help it. She forgets, sometimes, just how brilliant Ms. Hudson is, given that she hides it all behind her cheerful housekeeper façade. “I understand now why Sherlock said you were a professional muse.”

Ms. Hudson’s smile is more like a smirk. “And don’t you forget it. Now, shall we start trying to find little clues in these, or should I put on a season of _Homicide: Life on the Streets_ for us?”

******  
It’s almost midnight when there is a knock on Ms. Hudson’s door. Joan looks up from the chemical analysis she’s running on the paper Moriarty’s letters are written on, and Ms. Hudson looks over from where she’s making cupcakes. She had been analyzing the ink, but had let that sit so she could satisfy her craving for chocolate. Joan isn’t complaining. Ms. Hudson makes her taste the batter.

“Who could that be?” Ms. Hudson asks rhetorically, rolling her eyes. She sets the bowl back on the counter and walks over to the door, peering first through the peephole before opening the door, leaving the chain on. “She doesn’t want to speak to you.”

“Ms. Hudson…”

“Sherlock, you’re not going to use our friendship to get through this door. I’m Joan’s friend as well, and you’ve acted like a jerk.”

“I am perfectly aware that-”

“No,” Ms. Hudson interrupts, thrusting one finger through the gap and presumably into Sherlock’s face. “One day, this darling woman is going to get fed up with you and walk away, and then where will you be? Hmm?”

She can hear Sherlock sigh all the way across the room and through the door. “May I please speak to Watson, Ms. Hudson?”

Ms. Hudson straightens her spine, and Joan can just imagine the imperious look that she’s giving him. Sherlock likes to think that he has a monopoly on imperious looks, but Ms. Hudson can beat him without even trying. “It isn’t up to me, now is it? Nor is it up to you.”

She slams the door in his face, turning and leaning her back up against it. She gives Joan a mischievous look, pleased with herself. “Do you actually want to talk to him, dear?”

Joan rolls her eyes. “Not really, but if I don’t he’ll stand there all night, banging on the door.”

“Let him,” Ms. Hudson declares. “I have a fire escape. We can go stay with Alfredo.”

Joan walks over to her, standing on tiptoe to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you,” she says sincerely, knowing that she couldn’t ask for a better friend than her, “but I’ll just talk to him.”

Ms. Hudson studies her, eyes no less probing than Sherlock’s at his most intense, and then she sighs dramatically and nods. “Fine. I’ll just take my ink analysis to my bedroom and finish it for you. The living room is yours. Yell if you want me to shoo him away.” She turns before Joan can do much more than open her mouth, and removes the chain, flinging the door wide. “You may come in. But Sherlock, if you upset her…”

Joan looks back down at her microscope before she can see Sherlock’s reaction. Six months ago, they had asked Ms. Hudson to consult with them on a case where her Greek skills proved useful; she proved even more useful when she ended up walloping the criminal with her purse, where she kept a brick in case she was assaulted while out walking. Sherlock knows quite well that Ms. Hudson can make good on her threats.

“Of course,” he murmurs. Joan hears Ms. Hudson walk into her bedroom, hears the door click shut, and doesn’t look up from the microscope. It’s a silly little power play, but it has proven effective with Sherlock before, and he needs to know how upset she is.

“I, uh, brought you your pajamas. You didn’t pack a bag before you left, and I thought you would prefer these over what you’re wearing. And I wasn’t sure when you would return,” Sherlock says, his voice halting and tripping over the words. She ignores him, just adjusts a knob. There are some interesting salt deposits that she’s pretty sure aren’t local. The watermark had indicated that the paper was from the Czech Republic, so she supposes the deposits might be from there as well. She’s curious as to how Moriarty got paper from the Czech Republic while she was in prison.

“Were you intending to return soon, or shall I have some of your things brought over?” Sherlock asks.

It isn’t difficult, of course, to get paper from all over the world in New York City, she knows. But it is expensive, and it would require someone bringing it to her. And, as Marcus had told her after Porlock broke into the brownstone, Joan is Moriarty’s only visitor, according to the logs and the tapes.

“I didn’t touch your undergarments, out of respect for your boundaries. If you would prefer, I can have Emily over and have her pack you a bag. Do you need any of your books or notes?”

There are three possibilities, Joan thinks, sitting back and sliding her glasses back onto her face from where they had been propped up on her head. Either the logs and the tapes have been altered and Moriarty _has_ had visitors, an inmate is assisting her, or there is a guard who is helping her. All three are plausible, but Joan would put her money on the latter. The second is certainly possible, and Joan has no doubt that Moriarty is working with some of the other inmates, but setting up a potential murder while there are guards nearby, listening to everything, makes it a little more difficult. The first would imply a mass conspiracy, and even if Moriarty lives for those, she hasn’t had time to win over everyone in the prison, hasn’t had time to exert her considerable influence. Joan knows prison guards are corruptible; she’s never trusted them. But she doesn’t think every single guard in the prison could be turned so quickly. 

So. That leaves the third option. Just one or two guards, not all of them. Much more likely, and far more manageable.

“I’m- sorry,” he stammers, and Joan looks at him for the first time since he came in. He’s staring down at his hands, which are clasped in front of him. He left the brownstone without a coat, she notes absently. The tips of his ears are red from the late winter chill.

She raises an eyebrow. “For?” she asks. With Sherlock, she always has to ask. Too often he knows that he’s made a mistake, but he’s hard pressed to figure out what exactly it was, or he’s apologizing for a lesser crime while willfully ignoring the larger one staring in his face.

“I should have told you,” he says, and shifts his gaze so he’s staring past her left ear. “It was unconscionable, keeping information about Moriarty from you.”

“Why?” she presses, needing to know if he really understands.

“For a number of reasons,” he says, and bursts into motion, pacing back and forth between Ms. Hudson’s kitchen island and her sofa. “Not the least of which is because you’re my partner, and I cannot continue on hiding things from you. But also because you see Moriarty each week, speak with her, engage in a battle of wits, and I have been keeping valuable ammunition from you. Ammunition that could have meant the outcome of the war. And finally, because Moriarty is damaging to me, and I should have shown you the letters as my friend, as someone who cares.”

Joan gapes at him and takes off her glasses, rubbing her eyes. “Who did you call?” she asks.

Sherlock halts mid-step and gives her a wide-eyed look. “Excuse me?”

“Last time you pulled something like this, it took you nearly three weeks to figure out every reason I was angry. It’s only been about twelve hours. Who did you call to work out what you had done?”

He licks his lips. “If I did call someone and explain what happened, would you be more or less upset?”

“Sherlock.”

He deflates, quite literally. He folds his legs and sits on the ground, scrubbing his hands viciously through his hair. Joan twists in her chair, angling herself toward him.

“I did not call anyone,” he says softly into his hands, still wrapped over his face. “I have- I have known, you see, for quite some time, that what I was doing was wrong. That her- her letters were wrong. That I should be giving them to you, not tucking them away in a box where only I could see them. So you see, I already knew the reasons you were angry. I’ve been anticipating this argument for months now.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me about them months ago?” she snaps, forcing herself to remain still. Sherlock is the one who moves when irritated. Joan goes still. There is peace to be found in stillness, and none to be found in pacing.

Sherlock drops his hands from his face, staring up at her with a look of grief and emptiness. “I don’t know.” 

“Yeah,” she says, all the anger sliding out of her on the word until she feels as hollow as he looks. “I don’t either.”

She’s tired, she realizes. She spends most of her time these days trying to be one step ahead of Moriarty, and it exhausts her, and she doesn’t want to come home to find out that she’s been trying to get one step ahead while her partner had all the advantages and didn’t share them. She’s spent the past few months trying to dig out Moriarty’s other identities, scraping them from body language and accents and small nuggets of information that are otherwise forgettable. And Sherlock had information that she freely gave him the entire time.

“I am sorry,” he says again. His voice is hoarse. He isn’t looking at her anymore. “I- I never wrote her back.”

She looks back at him, surprised. “Wait, you never wrote back?”

He shakes his head. “No. You were right, Watson. Moriarty will never change. I admit, I held out hope after she failed to kill Agent Mattoo and told me that she did it for me. But then the first letter came, and- and it occurred to me that, perhaps, she told me that in order to ensure that I would continue our correspondence even after the unsuccessful conclusion of the Fuller case.”

“So you never wrote back,” she repeats.

“No,” he says again. “I could not continue to give her my time and energy. She did not deserve them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about them when I started visiting her?”

“I don’t know,” he says, staring at the floor. He looks back up at her after a beat. “Where do we go from here?

“For now?” she asks, and turns back to her microscope. “We work. Ms. Hudson?”

The door to Ms. Hudson’s room swings open immediately and she sticks her head out. After a beat, she looks guilty. “That made it a little bit obvious that I was listening at the door, didn’t it?”

Her mouth twitches at the corners. “A little bit.”

“We could tell anyway,” Sherlock says dully. He’s gone back to staring at the ground. “The light coming from beneath your door was patchy, indicating that something- in this case, someone- was obscuring it.”

“Oh,” Ms. Hudson says, and then tosses her hair over her shoulder defiantly. “Well, can’t blame a girl for trying. What did you need, Joan? Do you want me to get rid of him?”

She shakes her head. “No, that’s okay. I’m still angry at him, but he can stay. What I was hoping, though, was that you might want to help us track down Jamie Moriarty.”

Ms. Hudson brightens immediately. “I thought you’d never ask.”

******  
Joan sets up the wall of crazy at Alfredo’s the next day. Alfredo watches in silence until she finishes pinning up the last strand of yarn, linking Moriarty back to Merridew.

“Should I even ask what all of this means?” Alfredo asks. She turns and smiles at him.

“You probably don’t want to know. But thank you for letting me set it up. And thanks for letting me stay here.”

Alfredo rolls his shoulders nonchalantly and goes to sit down on his couch. “I didn’t really want to watch TV this week anyway.”

After spending the night at Ms. Hudson’s, Joan decided that she wasn’t quite ready to go back to the brownstone. She didn’t want to disturb Ms. Hudson’s carefully ordered life, however, so she’d called Alfredo. He’d been happy to put her up for a while, and even happier when she mentioned that Ms. Hudson would be spending a lot of time at his apartment with them.

Joan steps back, staring at the wall. She sits down next to Alfredo, not taking her eyes off the wall. She needs to go back to the beginning on this, look at what she might have missed.

“Why them?” she asks out loud. She feels Alfredo shift next to her. “That’s what I haven’t been able to figure out. Why did Moriarty give them up? Why Merridew, why Harden, why Ricoletti, why Wilson, why any of the others? I mean, Merridew is a small time con artist, Harden embezzled from his company. Wilson killed people who had snitched to the police, or people that had information they could have snitched. Ricoletti and her wife ran a brothel. What do they all have in common? What do any of them have in common?”

She sits in silence, staring at the wall, staring at the notes pinned next to each photograph. She’s been looking into all of their crimes each week, looking into their history, and looking at anything that could have happened because of their arrest, but she hasn’t seen anything that could have directly benefitted Moriarty. Harden’s stock prices plummeted upon his arrest, but the company is already back on the rise now that they’ve appointed a new CEO. Exposing the brothel run by the Ricolettis didn’t do anything except scatter the prostitutes to new pimps and madams, and new brothels. She hasn’t seen anything come of Merridew and Wilson’s arrest, or any of the other names she’s been given. She hasn’t heard word of Godfrey Norton resurfacing anywhere, either.

It’s frustrating.

“Maybe they don’t have anything in common,” Alfredo says, disrupting her thought process. She looks at him, raising her eyebrows. Alfredo raises his hands up defensively. “I’m not some big detective like you or Holmes, and I’m never going to be as smart as Ms. Hudson, but if you can’t find something in common with them, maybe it’s because they don’t have anything in common with each other. Maybe it’s their crimes that link them. Or the service that they provided to Moriarty. Maybe we got to think around corners.”

“I just don’t see it,” Joan says, allowing her frustration to creep into her voice. “I should be able to see it.”

“Hey,” Alfredo says, grabbing her knee and shaking it. “She’s a criminal mastermind. You don’t get that title by creating simple schemes. You’ll get there. Just gotta give it time.”

He’s right, and she knows it. But it isn’t what she wants to hear right now.

She turns her attention back to the wall of crazy.

******  
“I wonder how many possible games there are for poker,” Joan wonders, carefully fanning out her royal flush and smiling as both Ms. Hudson and Alfredo throw down their cards in disgust. She’s been living with Alfredo for three days now, and just two days ago decided she needed a game of poker to help her focus. She and Sherlock had taken to playing it a few times a week, but since she isn’t really speaking to him at the moment, she invited Alfredo and Ms. Hudson to join her. Alfredo claimed poker supremacy, and Ms. Hudson solemnly promised not to count cards (this time).

After seven hands, they haven’t won one yet.

“What do you mean?” Alfredo asks, trying not to sound too pissed as Joan pulls over his pretzels into her collection.

“Well,” Joan says, carefully stacking the pretzels into a tower. “Go has a lot of possible games- something like 10^360- in comparison to chess. I was just wondering how many poker has.”

Ms. Hudson gathers up the cards and shifts them back into a neat deck, handing it over to Joan. “They aren’t really comparable, in the end. Go is a two-player, non-chance game with perfect information, while poker is an n-player chance game with imperfect information.”

“Oh,” Joan says, and starts dealing a new hand.

Nobody says anything as Joan tosses out the cards, but as she picks up hers and starts planning her bet, Ms. Hudson says, “I didn’t realize you were interested in game trees.”

Joan looks up from her cards. “What?”

“You were talking about game tree complexities, weren’t you?” she asks.

Joan shakes her head slowly. “I don’t know what those are,” she says.

Ms. Hudson frowns. “Then why do you know Go’s game tree off the top of your head?”

“I don’t,” Joan says, frustrated. “It was just something Moriarty said one time while we were playing Go. That she liked Go, because it had about 10^360 possible games, while chess only had 10^123. And then she rambled about choices, and how you had to pick the choice with less to regret, and how people aren’t rational.”

“Less to regret, or least regret?” Ms. Hudson asks, her voice suddenly sharp. 

Joan shrugs. “It was a while back. But I think it was least regret, now that you mention it. Picking the choice with the least regret.”

“And she said most people aren’t rational?”

Joan puts her cards down. She doesn’t think they’re going to end up finishing this hand. “Yes. But is that surprising? Moriarty thinks of herself as a superior human being.”

“Is this important?” Alfredo asks, following Joan’s example and putting his cards down. He looks at her. “Does this mean anything to you?”

“No,” Joan says, feeling like she’s missed something.

Ms. Hudson fans herself with her cards, and then looks at Alfredo. “If I were to mention combinatorial game theory to you, what would you say?”

Alfredo’s eyes widen. “Um?”

“Exactly,” Ms. Hudson says, sounding satisfied. She turns her attention back to Joan. “What Moriarty was talking about, with the numbers, is called a game-tree complexity, which is the estimate of the number of positions we would have to evaluate in a minimax search to determine the value of the initial position It’s easy enough to understand-”

“Maybe to you,” Alfredo mutters.

“- _easy enough to understand_ ,” Ms. Hudson stresses, smacking Alfredo lightly on the arm, “but it isn’t something one brings up in casual conversation, in my experience. I could understand it as something a Go player would say, but not in the same conversation as less regret and rationality. They’re all concepts common in game theory.”

She licks her lips, her cards no longer interesting to her. “You think it could be a lead.”

“I can’t be sure, since anyone can read up on pop-math,” Ms. Hudson says, reaching up and pulling her hair back into a hair tie, “but it may be worth investigating. My research has been a dead end so far. I haven’t been able to get very far back with either Isadora Klein or Irène Fournaye, and we all know what a dead end the names Irene Adler and Jamie Moriarty have been. This could at least bring something fresh to our search.” She stands up and wanders away, talking to herself about combinatorial game theory, which means nothing to Joan.

After a beat, Alfredo tears his eyes away from Ms. Hudson, who is now pacing her apartment, and says “So… Go Fish?”

******  
After staying with Alfredo for five days, Joan goes back to the brownstone.

She has no intention of staying. Not for long, anyway. But she needs to pick up some more clothes, and she wants to let Sherlock know about the latest developments in the Moriarty case. As angry as she is with him for hiding the letters, he’s still her partner, and Moriarty still concerns him.

She wishes he felt the same way, but she isn’t going to hide things from him.

She uses her key to get in, and stands in the foyer, listening to the sounds around her in order to figure out where Sherlock is. It isn’t hard, actually- she can hear voices drifting up from the kitchen. Frowning, she takes off her coat, and then heads for the stairs.

At the kitchen table are Sherlock, Janae, Teddy, and Billy, which isn’t all that surprising. What is surprising is that all of their focus, and Sherlock’s, is on Porlock, who is talking animatedly and waving a cell phone around. Joan watches them for a minute, her stomach turning cold.

“Hey, guys,” she says, forcing a smile onto her face and knowing how false it looks. “What are you talking about?”

Sherlock jumps to his feet, smoothing his vest compulsively, sputtering something incoherent even as Porlock says, “He came back.”

“Who?” Joan asks.

Dimly, she sees Billy and Janae glance between herself and Sherlock with concern, but she is keeps her focus on Porlock, who is grinning and looks so proud of herself, holding up her cell phone again.

“That man,” she says. “The man who gave me the key. He came back, gave me this cell phone, told me he would contact me to give me more jobs.”

“I have already told her she is being foolhardy,” Sherlock interjects, taking a step closer to her and then halting.

“I thought you weren’t going to have anything to do with him,” she says, ignoring him.

“He found me,” Porlock says. “I was staying with Janae at the shelter, just like you told me to. Didn’t even go home or anything, just texted my friends, told them I’d found a new gig. I did what you said, I promise.”

Janae stands up. Joan manages to tear her eyes away from Porlock, noticing for the first time just how _small_ Janae looks. She’s only thirteen. She plays Double Dutch when she isn’t making Sherlock show her how to blow things up and melt things down. She’s a child. They all are.

“He came into the shelter,” Janae says carefully. “He came straight over to Porlock, like he knew where to find her. He just gave her the phone, said he’d send her messages, and she’d better answer.”

Porlock glances at Janae, and then back at Joan, her exuberance fading. “I didn’t go looking for him, Ms. Watson, I promise.”

“Really, Ms. J. She’s been with me the whole time,” Janae says.

She forces herself to relax. It is unlikely that Moriarty is aware of Porlock coming to them, and so it is unlikely that Moriarty is making a target of her. It is more likely that Moriarty is utilizing Porlock simply because she did once before, and she never questioned what she was being told to do. It is also very likely that Moriarty thinks it’s amusing to drag a child into her schemes, just because she knows how upset it would make Joan.

Moriarty isn’t going to murder Porlock. She’s just going to make her into a criminal like her.

“When did you get it?” she asks, walking further into the kitchen. Sherlock moves to the side, offering his chair. After a pause, she takes it. She’s still angry at him, but she isn’t going to be petty.

“This morning,” Porlock says. “He said he’ll send me some coded messages, and give me the way to solve it some other way. I’m to do whatever the message says.” She takes a deep breath, and then puts the phone on the table, pushing it towards Joan. “I want you to have it.”

Joan raises her eyebrows. “You aren’t going to argue that you should keep it?” she asks. She was preparing for a fight.

Porlock glances at Janae, who nods reassuringly at her, and then sets her shoulders. “I wanted to. I wanted to get all the codes and everything, and come be all heroic and stuff, but… but Janae said you wouldn’t want that. That you would want me to be a kid.”

Teddy scowls, and she can tell that he isn’t thrilled with the decision, though he’s abiding by it. Billy is smiling quietly; she imagines he backed Janae and her arguments the entire way. She wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of a Janae-and-Billy team up.

“The person who gave you this works for someone who has been involved in the murder of hundreds of people,” Joan explains, taking the phone and putting it in her pocket. “I think giving us this phone is the most heroic thing you could do.”

“Whatever,” Teddy mutters, and then yelps. Given the way that Janae is glaring at him, Joan thinks she probably kicked him.

“Anyway, so that’s that. That’s what we came to tell you. That I’m keeping my promise. That we won’t get involved,” Porlock says, and stands up. She’s wearing the coat Joan gave her. It’s too big, and hangs down past her knees, but it’s worlds better than the coat she had before. Joan hopes it keeps her warm.

“Thank you,” Sherlock says diplomatically, and ushers them out after Joan hands them all cab fare and a little bit extra for doing the right thing.

When he comes back, she’s staring at the phone, willing it to light up with a message, a code, something to point her in the right direction. They’re so close, she can feel it. All the clues, all the little pieces, are finally coming together. They’re moving into the endgame.

“It was good of them,” Sherlock says. “To bring us the phone.”

“I was hoping Porlock would believe me, when I said that this was beyond them,” Joan says, still studying the phone. “I’m glad I got through to her.”

“I’m not surprised,” Sherlock says, sitting down across from her. “You can be very persuasive when you wish to be, Watson.”

She doesn’t reply, and for a long time, they sit in silence. The phone is ugly and outdated, the plastic heavy in her hand. She’s surprised it is text-capable. It’s certainly old enough to be a phone only. 

“We’re close,” she says finally, putting the phone down.

Sherlock blinks. “We are?”

“Did Moriarty ever mention game theory to you?” she asks, and stands up to make herself a cup of tea. 

He’s silent for a long time, long enough for her to fill the kettle with water and put tea leaves in both of their cups. “Not that I can recall,” he says finally. “I admit, my knowledge of game theory is rather lacking. It is possible that I missed something in our conversations. Harlan would be better at determining if anything she mentioned was mathematically relevant. I gather your breakthrough is about game theory, then?”

“Ms. Hudson’s breakthrough,” she corrects, and lifts the kettle as it starts whistling. She pours the water into the cups, and then brings hers and Sherlock’s back over to the table. “Yes. It was something Moriarty said to me pretty early on that I didn’t understand. But when I mentioned it to Ms. Hudson, she said it was about game theory. She’s spent the past two days on Skype with some mathematics professors in England. They’re going through a bunch of papers, trying to find something or someone who might match Moriarty.”

“You have gotten that far off a single comment?” Sherlock asks, sounding impressed.

Joan gives him cold look. “A single comment, as well as some notations on the edges of the letters she sent you. Letters five, nine, and fifteen all had the edges torn off, if you’ll recall. But we could still make out some numbers and letters. Nonsense stuff, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but Ms. Hudson and her team of academics have narrowed it down to something having to do with differential games.”

“Whatever that is,” Sherlock says.

“Whatever that is,” she agrees. She’s exaggerating. She picked up a book on game theory, trying to familiarize herself with the concepts enough that she would understand what Moriarty was talking about, next time. It’s mostly above her head, but she knows enough now about minimax and payoff matrixes and differential games and rationality to pick up on it in a conversation. She’s even learned about some of the classic games, like Battle of the Sexes and reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. She thinks Sherlock would be interested in the latter, from a general perspective. She takes a sip of her tea. “You should have shown them to me sooner. We might have found her sooner if you had.”

“I know,” he says, sounding contrite. “I know, I-”

Before he can say anything else, her phone rings. She jolts, looking at the phone Porlock gave her, but it’s still dark. It’s her own phone, and it’s playing Ms. Hudson’s ring tone. She holds up a hand, cutting him off more effectively than her phone ever could, and digs in her purse until she finds her phone, answering the call immediately.

“Leonara,” she says.

Ms. Hudson’s reply is immediate. “I found her.”

******  
When they bring Moriarty into the room, Joan nods respectfully and says, “Professor.”

Moriarty raises a perfectly sculpted eyebrow and sits down, keeping her hands in her lap rather than reaching out and digging into the bowl of stones like she usually does. It’s a variation in her carefully acted routine, and Joan notes it. She thinks these little stutters in her act are all signs that perhaps Joan is keeping up in their war rather than constantly falling behind. Only occasionally does she feel like she’s managed to surprise Moriarty. 

“Oh?” Moriarty says, and it’s lacking her usual eloquence.

“Professor Jamison Moriarty,” Joan says casually, beginning her recitation of everything Ms. Hudson was able to find, everything they put together in the past two days. “When you were twenty-three, you presented your Masters thesis on differential games at the University of Durham. It was considered groundbreaking, from everything I’ve read from other mathematicians. You were hired by the University of Durham almost immediately thereafter.”

“My, my,” Moriarty says, her voice almost a purr, “you have been busy this week.”

“Funny thing is,” Joan says, leaning back, “before your Masters thesis, no one can find a trace of Jamison Moriarty. The undergraduate degree in your file is clearly falsified- no one at the University of Aberdeen remembers a Jamison Moriarty. And your hiring at Durham was oddly fast tracked, and two of the faculty who were involved in your hiring quit shortly thereafter.”

“Is that so?” Moriarty asks, not looking away from Joan’s face.

“Oddly, you quit your job at the University of Durham less than a year after getting it. Your colleagues say that you were intending to write a book, but they lost contact with you and no book has ever been published under the name Moriarty.”

“He finally told you, did he?” Moriarty says, finally reaching up and putting her fingers in her cup of stones, swirling them around slowly. “Showed you the letters? I left those clues just for you.”

“I’m curious,” Joan says, talking over her, “It’s hard, to suddenly appear with a Masters thesis in game theory, without some sort of grounding in mathematics, and yet Jamison Moriarty does just that. Which means you- the real you- knew math, calculus, game theory, before becoming Jamie Moriarty.”

Her eyes are cool. “You think so?”

Joan leans forward, dropping the casual act. “I’m going to find her, your original self, and I’m going to use it to make sure you can never, ever ruin another person’s life.”

“Like I ruined Sherlock’s?” Moriarty asks, leaning forward as well, staring directly into her eyes. 

“Like you ruined Kayden’s,” she says steadily. She doesn’t want to make this about Sherlock or herself. Not everything is about them.

Moriarty ignores her, a vicious smile playing on her mouth. “But really, how ruined is his life if he didn’t even tell you that I was writing him again? Are you certain, my dear Watson, absolutely _certain_ that he doesn’t want me around anymore?”

For a moment, she hesitates. For just a moment. Then she understands. “You bastard,” she says quietly.

Moriarty leans back and laughs. “It’s so easy,” she says, her laughter sparkling and beautiful in the dim, ugly room. “Joan, darling, it’s so easy to make you both dance. How big was the row, I wonder? Have you forgiven him, yet, for my manipulations?”

Joan purses her lips. The letters _were_ deeply manipulative. But it’s so clear, so blindingly clear just now, that they weren’t just to manipulate him. Set it up so that Sherlock hides information from her, and watch her walk away in anger. Watch the partnership, the friendship, quake. They were carefully constructed, just like everything else Moriarty did.

Except for maybe one thing. “Irène Fournaye,” she says, playing the only trump card she has. If she were playing it safe, she wouldn’t play it now, but it’s all she has. And she thinks she’s reached the place where she’s willing to take some risks.

Moriarty stops laughing, her face going from warm and amused to cold in the time it takes Joan to inhale. It’s easy to forget, during these sessions, that Moriarty is a cruel, vicious, evil criminal. She’s charming and clever, and she sees the danger, now, that Sherlock warned her about months ago. She’d managed to lose sight of the fact that Moriarty is dangerous, even in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffed. She won’t lapse like that again.

“It was a mistake,” she continues, “to use the name Irene for two aliases.”

“How did you find Fournaye?” Moriarty asks, all her amusement gone. This is more like the Moriarty Joan has always imagined confronting Sherlock in their home, or Gaspar in the warehouse, the one who is all business and ice.

“Same way I found Isadora Klein,” she says. “You make mistakes. Even if you don’t want to admit it. You aren’t as brilliant as you think you are. Did you really mean to leave me clues in Sherlock’s letters, or was that a mistake as well?”

Moriarty begins to drum her fingers against the table. She ignores it. Drumming fingers is a deliberate, calculated movement, not an involuntary one, for Moriarty. She does it sometimes when they’re playing Go. However much she may have startled Moriarty a moment ago, she’s back in control now. “Strange things happen at the one-two points,” she murmurs, quietly enough that Joan nearly misses it.

It’s an odd thing for her to say. Joan remembers her mother saying it, whenever she steeled herself for doing something she normally would never do, like arguing with the school board that Joan should be allowed into the Honors program despite her weak grades when she was in sixth grade, before they realized she needed glasses, or calling her stepfather and asking for money in order to get Oren into his first choice of college, after the first time they separated. It is her mother’s favorite Go proverb. She’s caught herself saying it from time to time, her mother’s inflection appearing on her tongue without permission.

Moriarty is not her mother. The words don’t belong in her mouth.

“What?” she asks, aware that something has changed in the room.

“I prefer infinitely long games, Joan,” Moriarty says, fixing her with a steely look. “I like to destroy people slowly, preferably over years. Money and murder, those are the work of a moment, but nothing is more satisfying than killing someone slowly. I should have known that I would have to make an exception for you. No infinite games with you.”

Joan licks her lips. The phrase ‘infinite games,’ before, would have meant nothing to her. It would have just meant a lot of games. But an infinite number of games means something different, in game theory, from a lot of games. It’s an actual mathematical concept, she remembers reading. And if Joan isn’t playing an infinite game, then she’s just playing a lot of games. And the thing about simply playing a lot of games, she recalls, is that the player should always play the current game as though it will be their last. You don’t save the pivotal, crucial move for your presumed final game; you make the move _now_.

If she’s reading her right, Moriarty just announced the final game.

Moriarty goes on. “I was going to break you slowly, Ms. Watson. Killing James Winter would have just been the beginning, you know.”

She looks around the room. They’re very alone, the two of them. “Uh-huh,” she says, for the lack of anything better. Her baton is in her purse, out at the front gate. She’s become a competent boxer, but she doesn’t know what sort of fighter Moriarty is. She suspects that any woman who masqueraded as a man and headed up a criminal organization is probably quite good. She clenches her fist, tensing her arm.

“Ah-ah,” Moriarty says, lifting her cuffed hands up. Joan can see the scars from where she dug out the tracking devices. “It’s a dangerous habit, making fists where prison guards might think you’re threatening their prisoner.”

She forces herself to relax. While she thinks that Moriarty has managed to bribe guards, she doesn’t actually know for sure. She doesn’t want to find out. “Say what you want to say,” Joan grits out. “You have five minutes before I walk out of here forever.”

Moriarty smirks. “I rather suspect that all I want to say has already crossed your mind.”

She can guess. She already has. If Moriarty intended for her to kill James Winter, then she was probably intending to make Joan into just as much a criminal as herself. She already asked Sherlock to join her. She thinks it probably isn’t surprising that she would ask the one person who defeated her to switch sides. “Then maybe my answer has already crossed yours,” she says coolly.

“You won’t change your mind?” Moriarty asks, her smirk becoming more pronounced.

“Absolutely not,” Joan replies, without hesitation. She thinks of the brownstone, with her boxes from police all over Europe with case files full of potential Moriarty crimes, and of Alfredo’s apartment, currently hosting her wall of crazy. Even without seeing Moriarty again, she’s certain she can find a few more of her lieutenants, a few more of her past crimes, with what she has and what she’s learned about the woman. Maybe even find Kayden.

Moriarty leans forward again and places her fingertips against Joan’s wrist. “You must drop it, Ms. Watson,” she says gently. “You really must, you know.” 

Joan pulls her hand away and stands up.

“No.”

******  
She calls Sherlock on her way home, waving for a cab and climbing inside. He picks up after one ring. “Are you all right?” he demands.

“She set us up,” Joan says immediately. Moriarty just declared open war on her, in her own way, and she wants to get this out of the way now so that when she gets home she can focus on what’s important. “She wrote you those letters with every intention of you hiding them from me. She wanted to drive us apart.”

There’s a brief silence on the line, and then, “She wrote that she was the only one who understood me.”

“Yeah, and while I want to yell at you for falling for such an obvious trap and thinking that you’re a special snowflake, I don’t have time right now. I’m pretty sure she’s taken off all the stops.”

She can imagine Sherlock, standing in their home, his face carefully blank. When he finally talks again, his voice is steady and measured. “Our next steps?”

Joan digs into her purse, touching her baton for a moment just to reassure herself, and then pulls out her notebook, flipping it open. “Do you have the case detective’s cell phone number?” she asks, trying to find the right page. 

“Detective Patterson?”

Detective Indira Patterson was in charge of Moriarty’s original case. She and Joan had a few drinks together, during the trial. She even hired Joan a few times to consult. Joan likes her and, more importantly, trusts her. “Yes. Do you have her number?”

“No. Captain Gregson and Marcus are the only two detectives I keep in my phone.”

She resists the urge to sigh. “Get a pen, I’m going to give it to you.” She gives him the phone number, cutting off his protests that he can remember the phone number without writing it down, and finally finds the right page, the page with Indira’s address. “Call her. Tell her I’m going to stop by her apartment in about forty minutes.”

She hangs up before Sherlock can say anything else. She has the terrible feeling that they’re working on a shortened time table, and every second counts. She still needs to get back to the Brownstone before she can get to Indira’s apartment.

When she bursts into the Brownstone, Sherlock is waiting for her, a box of files in his arms. “I thought you would want these,” he says, passing her the box. “Is the cab waiting?”

They’ve barely spoken in the past week. Joan hasn’t been able to look at him, knowing that he withheld evidence from her, knowing that he put Moriarty above their partnership, and while all of that is still true, and while she isn’t quite ready to forgive him, the knowledge that they were both manipulated expertly by Moriarty takes the edge off the anger. And here he is, reading her mind, as he’s always done. It’s amazing to her, how easily they fall back into their patterns of partnership.

“You made copies?” she asks, leading the way to the cab.

“Of course,” he says, grabbing another box and following her. He glances around them before adding, “And a third copy is in a blue envelope, in the secret compartment in your desk.”

She nods, figuring it’s a reasonable precaution. She suspects there are fourth and fifth copies stashed elsewhere in the Brownstone, but she doesn’t need to know. The copies that she made in the past week are in a safety deposit box at her bank and in a second deposit box under Ms. Hudson’s name. She’d insisted, despite Joan’s protests that it could potentially put her in danger.

“You need to call Marcus and Captain Gregson,” Joan says briskly, gesturing for the cabbie to pop the trunk.

“I texted Marcus after you called,” Sherlock replies, catching the trunk as it flies open, lifting it up the rest of the way for her. “I was about to call Captain Gregson and inform him of developments when I realized your intentions.”

She heads back inside to grab another box, but inside the doorway Sherlock catches the sleeve of her jacket, stopping her. “What happened?” he asks. “How do you know that she’s ready to move?”

Joan licks her lips. “Strange things happen at the one-two points,” she says, her accent nothing at all like Moriarty’s and everything like her mother’s.

Sherlock frowns, his forehead crinkles. “A Go proverb?”

“It means that the usual rules no longer apply,” she explains, and continues on into the Brownstone, unwilling to halt her progress, not when time is short. “And then she said that she prefers infinitely long games.”

It takes him a split second to figure it out. “She’s moved up her timetable,” he says.

She picks up another box, shifting it awkwardly in her arms as the files inside slide around. “Not just that she’s moved up her timetable, but that it’s time for the final game, the last one. It’s a game theory thing. Whatever she was planning, it’s happening now. Did you call Detective Patterson?”

“She said she’s looking forward to seeing you,” Sherlock says, squinting at her suspiciously. She ignores the look and heads back out to the cab. The cabbie looks like he’s taking a nap in the driver’s seat.

“Thank you,” she says, and moves aside so Sherlock can put his second box in the trunk. She glances at her watch. She needs to leave now if she’s going to make it to Detective Patterson’s apartment by the time she said.

“Be careful,” Sherlock says solemnly, taking a step back from her. She offers him a small smile, the only thing she can manage.

“Yeah, of course,” she says, and gets in the cab.

******  
She expected Moriarty to move fast.

She did not expect just _how_ fast, until the cab driver yells, which is the only warning Joan gets before a car slams into her cab.

She screams, her head slamming into the partition, despite her seat belt being on, and then careens sideways. She would have hit the window, except the window is gone, shattered glass all over her lap and imbedded in the side of her face. The cab driver is yelling, and there are people shouting, and she’s screaming, and she knows, knows without a doubt, that this isn’t a random car accident.

When she opens her eyes again, the car has stopped moving and horns are blaring. Her phone is buzzing incessantly in her pocket. She blinks, blood in her eyes. When she looks into the rearview mirror, all she can see is the trunk of the cab, popped open. Unless she’s very much mistaken, the boxes she and Sherlock loaded into the cab are gone, stolen the second they came to a stop. Joan blinks three times, reaching up and wiping the blood from her face.

“Are you all right?” she asks, reaching forward and putting a careful hand on the cab driver’s shoulder. His ID tells her his name is Amos.

“I’m fine, ma’am,” he says, wincing as he turns to look at her. His face contorts into horror. “Are _you_ all right?”

She imagines that she looks pretty awful. “Head wound,” she says ruefully. “They bleed a lot. It’s just some glass, I’m fine.”

“I don’t know what he was thinking,” Amos says, sounding stunned. “They had a solid red, and he just ran it. Wasn’t no way to mistake it.”

“No,” Joan agrees, leaning back and closing her eyes, the sound of sirens already filling her ears. “I’m sure there wasn’t.”

******  
“Watson? Watson?”

She hears Sherlock coming long before she sees him. She cringes, closing her eyes and carefully sitting up so that he doesn’t accidentally knock down her IV stand and rip the needle out of her hand. She can hear a nurse direct Sherlock to her curtained off section of the emergency room and makes a note to thank her later, since dealing with a frantic Sherlock can’t be a pleasant experience.

“Watson!” he yells, and she winces. She has a headache, a side effect from having her skull crash into solid plastic. A hand lands on her cheek, tilting her face up, and she nearly recoils. Sherlock doesn’t touch her, except for the one time he patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. She’s never begrudged him that- given all the other boundaries he disrespects on a daily basis, she’s thankful he has at least one- but it’s a shock to feel his hand cupping her face.

She opens her eyes to see his own blue ones frantically scanning her. He looks panicked, like he did when he arrived back at the Brownstone after Diaz shot Rhys, or shortly after Marcus was shot. She tries to smile at him and knows she fails horribly when his panicked look doesn’t falter. “I’m fine, Sherlock,” she tells him.

“You are not fine,” he snaps, and then cringes. “Forgive me. I do not mean to yell at you, of all people.”

She licks her lips. “I know. I’m fine, though, Sherlock, really. It looks worse than it is.”

“Where’s the doctor?” he asks, looking around him as though he expects a doctor to materialize through the privacy curtains. “I want a doctor to tell me you’re fine.”

“I’m a doctor,” she says irritably, but she doesn’t say anything further and doesn’t shake his hand off from where it has slid down to cradle her neck. It’s comforting, if she’s honest with herself.

“Marcus and Captain Gregson are on their way,” Sherlock tells her. “Detective Bradstreet has been assigned to watch the Brownstone for the time being. Detective Patterson called as well, she should be here shortly.”

“Have you checked in with Ms. Hudson yet? Or Alfredo? Any of the unofficial force?” Joan asks groggily, shutting her eyes. She can’t deny the fact that her head hurts.

Sherlock’s thumb rubs up and down the side of her neck as he says, “I’ve asked Ms. Hudson if she might consider a lengthy vacation, and Alfredo is insisting that as long as he’s my sponsor, he will remain in the city.”

“The unofficial force?” she asks again.

“I contacted Wiggins. She’ll get the word out to the others to lay low.”

Joan nods and allows Sherlock to guide her back to lie down in the hospital bed. She aches. But she doesn’t have time to be in pain. Moriarty is moving, and she needs to move too.

“What happened?” Sherlock asks, his voice hushed.

“A car ran a red, slammed into my cab,” she tells him, reaching up and putting her palm gently on her head, just next to the bandage taped across her forehead. “By the time I was able to focus, the trunk had been popped and all the files stolen.”

“She’s on the move, then,” he surmises grimly, pulling the chair closer to her bedside and sitting in it. “That was much faster than we could have anticipated.”

She nods. “I suspect that when Detective Patterson gets here, she’ll tell us that Moriarty has managed some sort of prison break.”

The prediction proves to be accurate not twenty minutes later.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Moriarty escaped Newgate early this morning, probably about an hour after you left,” Detective Patterson says, standing at the foot of Joan’s hospital bed. She’s a tall woman, thin and narrow with a strength about her that feels oddly diminished as she avoids Joan’s eyes. Joan wants to take her by the hand and tell her that it’s all right, it’s not her fault, that she knew this was coming, that they all knew this was coming, but she doubts it would be much comfort.

“Do you know how she escaped?” Joan asks around the lump in her throat.

Detective Patterson sighs and shakes her head, walking over and taking a seat in the empty chair on the other side of Joan’s bed. “It would appear that she simply… walked out.”

“Walked out?” Sherlock says, his voice biting. Joan winces. She wishes she could have talked to Indira without Sherlock there, but it’s too late for that.

“Yes,” Detective Patterson replies. “We can’t be entirely sure, because most of the security footage has been erased, but there was no tampering with her cell, no tools of escape, nothing of that nature. We questioned the guards and the inmates, but they refused to say anything. I think it is likely that she got to them somehow.”

They all sit in silence as the weight of that statement sinks in. She knew that Moriarty was able to access her network somehow, that she’d never stopped her activities in any real fashion, but she never imagined that she would have the resources to bribe or threaten each and every person in the prison. And yet, it appears that’s exactly what happened.

“How is that possible?” she asks quietly, stunned.

Detective Patterson rubs her eyes. “Prison culture is a complex thing, Ms. Watson. Moriarty’s presence made it doubly so. The truth will come out eventually, but it will take time.”

“Time that Watson doesn’t have,” Sherlock snaps, standing up abruptly. His chair makes an unpleasant squealing sound as it moves backward, hurting her ears and her head. “It is patently obvious, to even the most oblivious of observers, that her life is in danger.”

Joan reaches out to him, trying to get him to settle down, but Detective Patterson stands as well, crossing her arms behind her back and giving Sherlock a flinty stare. She had forgotten, in the months since she last saw her, just how formidable Detective Patterson is. “I quite agree. Which is why we’re putting a security detail on you both right away.”

Sherlock scoffs. “How can you guarantee that the security detail won’t turn out to be a hired hit squad? If Moriarty was able to get _an entire prison_ under thumb, it is a work of a moment to convince a few police officers to smother Watson in her sleep.”

She sits up, scowling. “Hey now. Whoa. Can we not discuss how I’m going to be killed? At least not right in front of me?”

Detective Patterson looks away from Sherlock, giving Joan a small smile. “Ms. Watson, as Mr. Holmes has pointed out, Moriarty is clearly capable of swaying many people over to her side, whether voluntarily or not. But I am planning on building your security detail myself, out of police officers and detectives that you have worked with in the past-”

“A terrible idea, Detective, do you know how many of those people are jealous of Watson’s talents?” Sherlock interrupts.

Indira ignores him. “- that you have good relationships with, as well as some of my own people that I consider trustworthy.” She sits back down on the edge of Joan’s bed, putting her hand on tops of hers. “I can’t guarantee that she won’t reach you, but I can guarantee that we’re going to make it damn hard for her.”

“That is not enough!” Sherlock says, but Joan glares at him before he can say anything else, and he settles, seething quietly in the corner.

“Thank you, Detective Patterson. I’m sure you will do your best.”

Detective Patterson smiles again, pats Joan’s hand, and stands. “If you will excuse me, I’m going to arrange the first shift of your security. The hospital said they’d be discharging you in about two hours; we should be set by then. Let me know if you need anything. You have my number.”

She nods at them both, her nod to Sherlock a bit more frosty than professional, and leaves. Joan watches her walk down the hallway through the glass window of her room, noting the confidence in her posture. 

She kicks back the covers, getting out of bed. She can’t sit here any longer, listening to people talk about her impending death when she can get up and fight this. Moriarty escaping prison is problematic, yes, and even terrifying if she stops long enough to think about it, but she can’t let that fear stop her. She’s had low grade terror thrumming through her body for months now. She can keep it at bay for just a little while longer, just long enough to bring everything they’ve found to the police, just long enough to warn law enforcement around the world. She hasn’t found everything yet, but she’s found enough to hurt Moriarty, enough to slow her down.

When she sways from a wave of dizziness, Sherlock is there, catching her elbow.

“Get back in bed,” he scolds, and she shakes him off.

“No,” she says. “No, I won’t. I won’t just lay there while you and Detective Patterson and God knows who else stand around and discuss my potential murder. We have things to do, Sherlock.”

“Like get you out of the country,” he says. Rather than try to push her back towards the bed, he walks over to where her clothes are piled and hands them to her, turning his back so she can get changed.

Joan shakes her head, even though he can’t see her, starting to pull off the hospital scrubs. “That’s pointless and you know it. Her organization is international, and there’s nothing to keep her here in New York- if we leave, she would just follow us.”

“It would at least slow her down,” he argues, and she sits back down on the edge of her bed, her jeans only half on, so she can rub her forehead in frustration. She knows he just wants to protect her, and that he’s scared too, even if he would never put it that way, but she needs him to trust her to know what’s best for _her_ right now.

She doesn’t say that, though. Instead, she says, “We have a support system here that we don’t have in other countries. We know the people here. We know the city. At the very least we know that Marcus and Captain Gregson aren’t working for Moriarty, and that gives us two people we can trust implicitly.”

She stands back up, pulling her jeans all the way on, watching as a muscle jumps on the side of Sherlock’s throat as he works out what he wants to say next.

“I have contacts in-”

“In many countries,” she interrupts, softening her voice. “But none whom we can trust with our lives.” She takes a breath. “Please, Sherlock. Please trust me on this. I want to stay. I want to work through this, until it’s done, until the end.”

He turns around, even though she hasn’t given him the signal that she’s finished dressing. His eyes are wide, and haunted, and it doesn’t take much for Joan to see the ghost of Irene lingering in them.

“I trust you,” he says. “Of course I do. And this is your case. But if anything happens- if it were to- if you-”

“I know,” she says, and steps closer to him, putting her hand gently on his wrist. “I know.”

He stares down at her. She looks back. Finally, he nods. “All right, then. All right.”

She works on gathering the rest of her things, and pretends she doesn’t feel him watching her every move.

******  
The ride home is quiet.

Detective Patterson is driving them home herself, and Marcus is in the car behind them. There’s another car ahead of them- Joan thinks they have Detective MacDonald driving that one, but she can’t be sure, she didn’t get a good look. Based on what Indira said, Captain Gregson and a select few are at the brownstone right now, securing it for their return.

It feels surreal. They’ve certainly had security details before, often had uniforms standing outside their home. They’re consulting detectives; it’s part of the job. Never before, though, has so much manpower been devoted to them. She’s never seen so many people look so serious. Even Marcus greeted her with a grim, solemn face, rather than the smile or at least the eyeroll at Sherlock’s histrionics that she’s come to expect.

She doesn’t like it.

On her right, Sherlock is sitting silent, staring out the window. He hasn’t brought up leaving the country again, and his only request to her the entire time has been that she stop arguing with the orderly and allow herself to be wheeled out of the hospital, as per policy. Of course, as soon as she had sat down in the wheelchair, he’d shoved the orderly aside and taken control of the chair himself, stating that he didn’t trust the man, but that was almost normal behaviour for Sherlock, so she’d allowed it.

As they pull up to the brownstone, which has police officers everywhere, Sherlock shifts in his seat, turning to look at her. “If you change your mind…”

“I won’t,” she says firmly, and gets out of the car, holding her head as defiantly as she can.

She wishes she felt as confident as she’s pretending to be.

******  
Joan sleeps restlessly that night. Between the headache she has from hitting her head (no concussion, though, the one bit of good news she has had all day) and the looming danger of Moriarty, it’s hardly surprising. Around one in the morning, she resigns herself to feeling gritty and as if her skin is electrified for the rest of the day, and sits up in bed. She might as well do something productive, since she can’t sleep.

It’s a decision that ends up saving their lives.

Half past two, Joan looks up from a file folder on organized crime in London, frowning. She smells smoke. She considers ignoring it- smoke is a common enough occurrence at the brownstone- but something tugs at her gut, and she kicks her covers off, opening her bedroom door.

The hall and stairwell are thick with smoke. She looks around for a moment, panic slicing through her brain even as she notes that the smoke seems to be rolling down from the upper stories, and that she can see fire licking the walls above her. Then she turns, grabs her sweater, unplugs her phone from its charger and puts it in her sweatpants pocket, shoves her feet into boots, and runs out of her room and down the stairs.

The smoke is worse down here, improbably. She realizes why as she reaches the bottom of the steps and sees another fire in the foyer, already lapping at the inside door. They won’t be able to escape that way. She wonders where their security detail is. She wonders if something happened to them, or if they’re allowing this to happen because of bribes or threats or something else.

“Sherlock!” she yells, turning into the parlour, grabbing their coats as she goes. She stops at Clyde’s terrarium, carefully picking him up. “Sherlock!”

A moment later, she hears the pounding of footsteps coming up from the lower level. Sherlock bursts through the door, looking worried, and immediately starts coughing. “Watson!” he calls.

“The third floor is on fire, at least,” she says quickly, thrusting his coat at him and then handing Clyde over. “And there’s another fire in the foyer.”

“The back, then,” he says, ushering her in front of him.

“There are copies of the files hidden elsewhere, right?” she asks, allowing herself to be steered. She feels her phone vibrate in her pocket, but ignores it. “Tell me we have backups elsewhere.”

Sherlock coughs a little as they start down the stairs. “Later, I will lecture you on the importance of maintaining your own system of backups, postal boxes, security deposit boxes, dead drops, and so forth, but for now-”

“I _have_ backups, Sherlock, I was just-”

Joan halts, cutting him off as he slams into her back. She can hear him asking her why she’s stopped, but she can’t find it in herself to answer. Instead, she settles for pointing.

There’s another fire at the base of the stairs.

Part of her brain focuses on panicking. Another part thinks, _the arsonist is still here, they’re watching us, they’re blocking us in, is it a police officer, is it a stranger, how is this happening, we need to catch them_. A third part, however, focuses on the problem at hand.

She turns around and shoves at Sherlock, pushing him back up the stairs as her phone vibrates for a second time. “Go,” she urges. “We don’t have much time.”

She’s right, as it turns out. By the time they’re back in the front room, the fire has reached the parlour and is headed for the stairs. There must have been some sort of accelerant, she notes vaguely. Fire doesn’t spread that quickly by itself.

“My bees!” Sherlock says suddenly, giving her a wild look. “Watson, my bees!”

“No,” she snaps, and looks around for another exit. There’s only one possible option. They’ll have to go out the windows. She rushes over, grabbing the edge and heaving it upwards.

It doesn’t move.

Joan grits her teeth, refusing to panic.

“Watson, we have to get my bees- the _Euglossia watsonia_ \- we can’t just-”

“We can,” she says, part of her aching. She’s come to love the bees, but they’re surrounded by fire. The only thing that matters right now is that they get out. She looks at the windows again, knowing the solution is right in front of her.

And when she turns again to look at Sherlock and make sure he hasn’t gone racing up the stairs in a mad attempt to save their bees, she realizes that it really is.

She races into the lock room and grabs as many of the solved padlocks as she can and then, before Sherlock can question what she’s doing, comes back over and throws one, as hard as she can, at the window.

It shatters instantly, a very satisfying sound.

She uses the rest of the locks to knock out as much of the glass as possible, and then wraps her coat around her elbow, shoving the last big shards out onto the ground below. Once it’s clear enough, she grabs Sherlock and pushes him to the opening. “Go,” she says. “We need to go. Now.”

To his credit, he doesn’t hesitate, only shoots one last longing glance back towards the stairs as he eases himself out of the window. She’s right behind him, the edges of the broken glass biting into her hands, arms, and legs. She can tell that she’s bleeding, but she’ll take it over being burned any day.

The ground is far below her, but the ledge is just wide enough for her to edge along it until she reaches the steps and Sherlock. He reaches out for her, looking ridiculous with soot on his face and Clyde wiggling helplessly in his coat pocket. She takes his hand, he pulls her off the ledge and into him, and then they lurch down to the sidewalk.

There’s no sign of their security detail. Joan reaches into her sweater to get her phone so she can call 911.

It isn’t her phone. She stares at it for a moment before realizing it’s the phone that she took from Porlock two days ago. Her phone is in her sweatpants pocket. But this one is blinking at her. It’s the text notification light.

Next to her, Sherlock is on the phone with emergency responders, so Joan turns aside to look at the texts.

Both texts are gibberish, but they’re a gibberish she recognizes. She last saw a code like this when they took a cell phone to Sebastian Moran, shortly before he killed himself. It’s Moriarty’s code, one of the ones she used for her lieutenants, on Porlock’s phone.

Joan wasn’t the one to crack the code last time, but she’s learned it since, and it doesn’t take her long to puzzle out the meaning of each text once she pulls up the time stamps.

_I have Porlock. Did you know her name is Lia? She’ll tell you anything you want to know with the right pressure._

_High Bridge, three thirty. Or you can add Porlock to your long list of failures._

Sherlock is shouting something indistinct into his phone, waving his free arm around, and she can hear sirens in the distance. She pulls out her real phone from her sweatpants and looks at the time. It’s almost three in the morning. She opens up a map on her phone, inputting the brownstone’s address and High Bridge. It’s about twenty-five minutes away in the current traffic.

She looks back at Sherlock. In the light of the fire, she can just see the hollows under his eyes, his sharp cheekbones, the pointy tip of his nose that she’s memorized over the past few years with him. In this light, he looks lovely.

She walks away and goes to hail a cab.

******  
In the cab, she disables the GPS on her phone. She pulls up her contacts list and sends a carefully worded text to her mother. She thinks about sending a text to Ms. Hudson, Alfredo, Marcus, Emily, Hope… any of her friends. Instead, she carefully deletes all of their information from her phone. 

Five minutes into her drive, she receives a text from Sherlock.

_Whr r u?_

She ignores it, and sets about clearing her internet browsing history.

Five minutes after that, she gets another text.

_U lv brwnstn?_

She deletes all the pictures off her phone, feeling a fleeting sadness as her friends and family disappear, their smiling faces gone with pictures from crime scenes and book titles she found interesting.

Fifteen minutes into the drive, Sherlock sends another text.

_Why?_

She stares at that one for a long time, and then carefully texts back, _I’m sorry_ before deleting Sherlock from her phone.

******  
Most New Yorkers are at least vaguely aware of High Bridge. It’s the oldest bridge in New York City, and also has been closed to all traffic since the 1970s, though it’s been undergoing renovations and is supposed to open to pedestrian traffic later in the year. It’s covered in tarps and wires and steel at the moment.

She knows she’s walking into a trap. She imagines there are probably snipers in High Bridge Tower (also closed to the public, but she doubts that trespassing is a crime that causes Moriarty hesitation) and in the park, or that Moriarty has arranged for a truly clever murder. It would only be fitting, after all, given her role in Moriarty’s downfall.

She knows she’s walking into a trap, but she’s okay with that. Sherlock has all of the files, she knows. Moriarty may not be destroyed, but she’s severely inconvenienced, and it will only be a year or two before Sherlock manages to put together the last pieces of the puzzle. She trusts him to complete her work, just as he trusted her to complete his. Even though things have been rough between them for the past week or two, they are, in the end, a partnership. A very, very good one.

Joan takes a deep breath, willing herself to stoicism, and steps out onto the bridge.

Nothing happens. There is no gun shot, no flash of light, no explosion. So Joan takes another step. And another. She will not be scared. She will face this with bravery.

She reaches the middle of the bridge when she sees Moriarty. She’s standing by the edge, leaning on the rail and looking out over the Harlem River. She looks peaceful, content. Her hair is pulled back into a messy bun, and she’s wearing a simple pair of jeans, a cardigan, a pair of ballet flats. She’s not the woman Joan met with in the prison, but neither is she the woman who politely kidnapped her for their first introduction.

“Joan,” Moriarty says, standing upright and smiling her lopsided smirk.

“Jamie,” Joan replies.

“I almost thought you wouldn’t come,” Moriarty says, walking toward her. Joan stands perfectly still, staring straight ahead. “Only a few more minutes, and I would have been forced to kill that poor Porlock girl. It would have been a waste of everyone’s talents and skills.”

“I was inconvenienced by a fire,” she says. “It’s amazing how being trapped in a burning building will make it difficult to make a rendezvous.”

Moriarty throws back her head and laughs, a careless, carefree sound. She looks as close to happy as Joan has ever seen her.

“I did worry that it might slow you down,” she says, stopping in front of Joan. “But then, I couldn’t risk any of your files surviving, you see.”

“Or me.”

Moriarty’s smile shifts, making the change from cat-like to shark-like. “My dear Joan, why would you think that?”

“Let Porlock go,” she says, trying to get to the point. Moriarty likes banter, she knows, but she wants this to end tonight. She’s ready.

Moriarty waves a hand about dismissively, turning and walking back to the rail of the bridge. “I already did. She was so boring, Porlock. I can’t imagine why Slaney chose her to be our messenger, but then, beggars can’t be choosers. She was really just bait. I had her long enough to scare her, and then sent her away. But I knew you would come running the moment you thought one little girl was in danger. You’re so predictable, Joan.”

Joan makes note of the name Slaney, and then mentally kicks herself. They aren’t sitting in the relative safety of a prison anymore, a Go board between them. This isn’t a game or a puzzle anymore. Remembering one more name won’t do her a bit of good.

“I asked you here tonight to give you a choice,” Moriarty says.

Joan raises her eyebrows. “A choice?”

Moriarty nods, dragging her fingers along the rail. “You know how much I like choice, Joan. I love opportunities. I have an opportunity for you, and that is to choose what happens next.”

“How about you go back to jail?” she says immediately.

She laughs. “That is not one of your choices, I’m afraid. Though I’m glad to see you’ve retained your sense of humour. I have three options for you. One, you die, here and now. I have several ways to make that happen, most of which would be relatively painless.”

“I’m so glad you’ve considered my comfort,” she says as dryly as she can around a tongue that feels like lead in her mouth.

“I said relatively, not completely. It has to bring me some amount of joy, of course.”

“Of course.”

“The second option,” Moriarty continues blithely on, as if she hadn’t just discussed Joan’s death, “is that you walk away from here tonight and continue your work to bring down my organization.”

“That one,” Joan says instantly.

Moriarty raises one perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “Now, now, Joan, let’s not be too hasty. This option comes with a rather large caveat, one that I think would give you pause. You walk away from here tonight and continue your work to bring down my organization, and in return, I slowly kill every single person you love. I’ll begin with your mother, Mary. It was easy, last time, to get to her. You wouldn’t have a chance to protect her. She’d be dead by the time you reached the end of the bridge. And then I’ll move onto Oren. After that, your father. Your real father, I mean, not your stepfather. Yes, Joan, I know where your biological father is. Do you even know where he is?”

Joan’s stomach goes cold as Moriarty starts to pace along the bridge. “Once he’s dead, _then_ I’ll kill your stepfather. After he’s gone, well, I’m rather spoiled for choice. Liam, maybe? You’ve never forgiven yourself for not being able to help him, I’m certain you could never forgive yourself for his murder. How about Ty? Your mother loves him, even if you never did- another thing you’ve never forgiven yourself for, incidentally, though I think you’re being rather hard on yourself for that one, he’s incredibly dull, I can understand why you never loved him. Emily and her daughter? Hope and Ken? Ms. Hudson has finally turned her life around and started living for herself; it would be a shame for her to die because of you.” She stops pacing and smiles. “You understand where this leads, don’t you? You, alone, everyone you ever loved dead. And only then will I kill you, if you haven’t killed yourself. So you see, you may wish to rethink your decision on option number two.

“Option number three, though… I think you’ll appreciate the eloquence of it. Option number three is that you disappear.”

Joan blinks, startled. “Disappear?”

She nods. “Not to me, of course. I’ll know exactly where you are, because you’ll be exactly where I put you. But to the rest of the world? You’ll have simply gone.”

“And where will I be?”

“Safe. In a house somewhere. Guarded by one of my most trusted lieutenants. You’ll be free to pursue any activity you want in the house- save for anything related to me, of course- though you’ll have to ask permission to ever leave. It wouldn’t be a permanent arrangement. Three, four years at the most.”

Moriarty looks pleased with herself, leaning against the rail of the bridge and staring out over the water. Joan studies her carefully, matching her ease with everything she’s ever seen of Moriarty in the past months. She really is calm, Joan realizes. Her body language matches every time Moriarty had the upper hand in the prison. It’s the same posture as when she sent her to Killer Evans. She knows what she’s doing right now, and she fully expects to win.

Joan’s stomach lurches. “What makes you think I would agree to that?”

“Because it’s the only decent option for you. Two options end with death, violent and messy. This option… this option is seki, Joan. Mutual life. It’s better than death, as you once so astutely said.”

She thinks. She doesn’t doubt that Moriarty has the capability to kill her now. Joan came prepare to die tonight, but it’s another thing to actively choose your own death rather than to just accept it when it comes. Joan doesn’t think she’s brave enough to choose death.

And she can’t let the people around her die. If she gets to choose, she’ll always choose to keep them safe.

“There is a fourth option,” she says quietly. 

Moriarty looks up from her contemplation of the Harlem River. “Oh?”

Joan nods. “I could kill you.”

Moriarty throws her head back, peals of laughter making her shake. Joan doesn’t laugh with her.

“Oh, Joan, you don’t have it in you to purposefully take a life. I know that already. You’re too weak for it. You hide your killing in medical ‘accidents’ and a willingness to turn a blind eye. If I were on your surgical table, perhaps I would be frightened, but murder? No, no. You could never do that.”

“It would be self-defense. Self-defense isn’t the same as murder,” she replies.

“Perhaps in a court of law, but to your conscience? You can’t even cope with dead patients. How could you ever cope with having purposefully murdered me?” Moriarty turns and walks toward her. She stops within inches of her, watching and waiting.

Joan wants to reach out and wrap her hands around Moriarty’s throat. She wants to force her backwards, over the rail, and down into the water below. She wants to use her hard earned boxing skills and beat her until the bones under her hands break.

But she can’t. She won’t.

She releases a long, shaky breath. Moriarty gives her a smug look and turns away. “I thought not.”

“If I accept the third option, there will be rules,” she says.

“Of course,” Moriarty says. “I never expected you to blithely accept the conditions.”

“You don’t hurt or kill my family and friends,” Joan says, following her. She doesn’t want Moriarty to try to say later on that she didn’t hear her. “You leave them completely alone- no letters, no phone calls, no visits from your lieutenants, nothing. Leave them alone.”

“Of course,” she says mockingly.

“That includes Sherlock.”

Her face twists a bit at that, and Joan considers it a small victory. But slowly, reluctantly, Moriarty nods. “I will leave them alone, so long as you abide by our arrangement. The moment you break our agreement, then I will assume you’ve opted for option number two after all, and their lives will be forfeit.”

Joan expected nothing less. “I doubt you’ll ever let me out of the house you’ve picked, so I demand access to newspapers and the Internet.”

“No,” Moriarty says. “Providing you with Internet access means providing you contact with people. I know about your friends in Everyone.”

Joan wouldn’t exactly call them friends, but she pushes on. “Under supervision, then.”

“No. I will permit newspapers. But not the Internet.”

She grits her teeth, but Moriarty has all the power in this negotiation, and she knows it. She thinks the only thing she could effectively bargain for was the lives of the people she cares about, since they’re the only reason she’s considering the deal. But she isn’t going to stop trying.”

“Whatever supplies I want, I get,” she continues.

“Such as?”

“If I want medical journals, I get them. If I want the newest bestseller, I get it. If I want a treadmill, I get it.”

“Certainly. Of course, this will all be within reason. If you ask for, say… a gun and a round of ammunition, you will be denied. As long as you keep your requests innocuous, they will be granted.”

She takes a slow, deep breath. Her next request will not go over well, she suspects. “I want to say good-bye to Sherlock.”

Moriarty shakes her head. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”

“He deserves a good-bye,” Joan argues. Then she laughs bitterly. “After all, you’re giving me the Irene Adler treatment. He shouldn’t have to go through that again. Not without a good-bye, at least.”

“The Irene Adler treatment. I like that. I suppose it is similar to what I did to poor Irene,” Moriarty muses, pursing her lips and looking up at the sky. Joan watches her think and focuses on not holding her breath. Then she looks back at her, mouth twisted into an expression of scornful pity. “You realize that saying good-bye won’t mean that he’ll forgive you for leaving.”

It’s a statement, not a question. Joan shakes her head. “It’s not for me. I know he’ll never forgive me for this. It’s for him. So he- so he gets some closure, this time.”

Moriarty’s look is considering, and finally she nods, coming to stand next to Joan. “I will allow you to text him.”

She doesn’t hesitate, in case she changes her mind. She pulls out her phone, types in his number manually, and then freezes. She doesn’t know what to say.

She wants to tell him about the deal she made, about what is happening, but she knows Moriarty will never allow that- considering the way she’s staring over Joan’s shoulder, she suspects she’ll object if too much is said. And if she can’t tell him the truth of what’s happening, then she doesn’t know what to write.

She wants to tell him thank you, for taking her on as an apprentice and then accepting her as a full partner. She wants to tell him she’s sorry, again, for leaving him like this. She wants to tell him he’s her best friend, as strange as it may seem at times. She wants to remind him to take care of Clyde. She wants to tell him to take of _himself_ , since she can’t be there to make sure he does. To keep on with Alfredo while he’s struggling in the aftermath, to talk to Leonora about how he’s feeling, to have dinner with Marcus sometimes, because he needs more friends too. She wants to tell him that she doesn’t have a choice. Not a real one. Not one that she can accept.

Her fingers hover over the keys, and finally she starts typing.

_Thank you for everything,_ she types, because she is thankful, for being taught, for the change in her life, for the adventure, for him.

_I’m so sorry,_ she types, because she is, she knows how much pain this is going to cause everyone, but especially him.

_I hope you can forgive me someday,_ she types, because when- if, she’s not stupid- Moriarty releases her, she wants to have sown the seeds in advance that he’ll ever be able to look at her without disgust on his face for abandoning him.

_You are the best and,_ she hesitates, because she wants to type wisest, but Sherlock once melted a tire in the brownstone, making the entire place smell like burnt rubber for weeks, and Sherlock forgets to eat and sleep and wear clothes sometimes, and sometimes Sherlock says hurtful things that he knows aren’t true just because he wants to push buttons, and none of those things are wise. She settles for typing _smartest man I have ever known._

She looks at the words, knowing they aren’t enough, and hits send. Then she wipes tears from her eyes and cheeks, sets her shoulders, and looks at Moriarty. “I’m ready.”


	2. 2

******  
A car picks them up. Joan sits in the back with Moriarty as she lists out the terms of their agreement.

She can’t speak with anyone, unless they’re one of Moriarty’s people. She cannot leave the house unless accompanied by one of Moriarty’s people, who will obtain permission from Moriarty in advance. She cannot use the Internet or any phones. She may have a computer, but it will only contain basic Microsoft programs. She must not try to escape or contact anyone- if she does, the agreement is null and void, and people die. If she harms her babysitter, then the agreement is null and void, and people die. If she puts one foot out of line, the agreement is null and void, and people die.

Joan nods numbly, staring down at her phone.

It’s been lighting up with text notifications steadily since she sent her text to Sherlock. Texts from Marcus and Ms. Hudson and Alfredo and Captain Gregson- even Emily, Hope, Ken, Jenn. She got texts from Janae, Billy, and Teddy, including a text that said that Porlock was safe, that she went to Janae, and they’re keeping her safe for Joan. Texts from Irregulars, people Joan has only ever met once or twice, if she’s ever even met them at all.

Her mother called.

Joan didn’t answer.

She imagines Sherlock is casting about desperately, contacting everyone he knows and trying to have them find her. He doesn’t text her at all.

She gets a text from Oren. From Gabrielle. From her stepfather. From Gaye, and Pam, and Randy.

“We’re here,” Moriarty says as the car pulls to a stop.

Joan’s phone lights up. She looks back down at it. It’s Sherlock.

_Wtsn plz._

It’s a plea. She desperately wants to type back, but Moriarty is looking at her expectantly. Her phone lights up again. And then again. She looks down.

_Watson._

_Please._

Joan closes her eyes. She deletes all the messages, each and every one of them, pulls out her SIM card and calmly, with Moriarty watching, scratches the back of it with her keys, and then passes her phone over to her waiting hand.

Moriarty gets out of the car, leaving Joan a moment to look at the house through the window. Two stories, white, a picket fence. It looks older, built in the previous century. There are shutters on the windows, and the garden is overgrown. She supposes that Moriarty’s lieutenant, whoever they are, isn’t much of a gardener. The path up to the front door is cracked, and there are no lights on. Despite it all, she can’t help but think that it feels familiar, somehow.

She doesn’t have a chance to pursue the thought. Moriarty pokes her head back in and says, “Come along, Joan.” As slowly as she can, she follows.

“I think you’ll be pleased with your new home,” Moriarty says, turning around and walking backwards, obviously watching her every reaction. Joan refuses to give her one, keeping her face carefully neutral. She’s a poker player. She can do this. “It’s spacious, but very comfortable. I made sure to provide you with luxuries- the bathtub is something I’m sure you’ll love.”

Joan imagines drowning Moriarty in it.

Before they can get all the way up the walk, the door to the house swings open. Joan forgets to keep her face neutral, shock overwhelming her for a moment. Looking irritated and displeased is Sebastian Moran, his face covered in far more scars than the last time she saw him- which was shortly before he killed himself.

“Moran?” she blurts.

Moran leers at her even as he steps respectfully aside to allow Moriarty into the house. “Ms. Watson. Pleasure to finally meet you. Heard so much about you.”

Joan keeps her eyes on him as she edges around him and into the house. His face is covered in scars, concentrated around his forehead. One dips alarmingly close to his eye, and she can imagine the glass digging into him, nearly lacerating his eyeball. She and Sherlock never went to view his corpse after he killed himself- too caught up in Moriarty’s game, and then in the aftermath- but she had read the autopsy report, read the description of how he slammed his head into the mirror repeatedly until the blunt force trauma finally killed him.

Apparently, the reports were faked and the coroner one of Moriarty’s people. She wonders if Moran’s survival is an accident that Moriarty took advantage of, or if Moriarty gave him specific instructions on just how much to harm himself, how far to go without irreparable damage being done. She would wonder how one woman could hold so much sway over a person, to order them to do what Moran did with just one mention of a sister, but Joan is handing over her freedom after a brief conversation and some threats, so she doesn’t need to wonder. She knows all too well.

Just inside the door is a small entrance hall, with stairs directly in front of her. Moriarty is walking confidently to the right of the stairs, however, into a large room. “Through here is the parlour, though of course you won’t be entertaining any guests. Just over there is the kitchen- no dining room, I’m afraid, just a breakfast nook- and off the hall on the left is Moran’s bedroom. There’s a bathroom down here as well, though I think you’ll find the one upstairs more to your liking.”

Joan follows her silently, barely glancing around her. Moriarty looks smug and pleased, and she won’t give her the satisfaction of any more reactions.

Moriarty looks back at her over her shoulder and raises an eyebrow. “Shall we explore the upstairs, then?” When she doesn’t answer, Moriarty breezes past her and heads up the stairs. She follows, excruciatingly aware of Moran at her back, pressing just too close for her comfort.

The upstairs is small, the hall narrow, even narrower than the ones in the brownstone. When Moriarty reaches the top of the stairs she walks forward and opens the door directly at the end of the landing, Joan behind her.

It’s another bedroom, small and bare. Her stomach goes cold. Even though the architecture of the room is different than her bedroom at the brownstone, it’s laid out exactly the same way. Bed, chair, lamp- even the book she was reading two nights ago. She looks around numbly. The closet door is cracked open, and she can see clothes peeking out. Her clothes. Probably not her exact clothes, the ones that she rifled through this morning, but duplicates. Down to the blouse she bought three weeks ago while with Carrie on a girl’s night out.

Someone has been in her room. Someone has told Moriarty what is there. Someone has taken a great deal of time to get the details right. Recently.

“Who?” she asks around lips she can no longer feel. Her tongue is heavy in her mouth.

“No one you know,” Moriarty says, and it’s almost reassuring. “Rest assured, Joan, you were not betrayed. It was quite frustrating, actually; your friends have very little to be blackmailed with, nor are they the types to willfully turn on a friend.”

It’s a cold comfort, but she supposes it is a comfort nonetheless. “I’m so sorry to have frustrated your plans,” she says. Moran laughs behind her, and his chest brushes against her shoulder. She jolts and yanks around. “Don’t touch me.”

Moran smirks. “Awfully jumpy, aren’t you?”

She turns and looks back at Moriarty, lifting her chin as imperiously as she can, given her circumstances. “If he touches me,” she says, “our deal is off.” Moriarty starts to say something, but Joan cuts her off. “If he touches me, if he hurts me- our deal is off.”

“He must be permitted some leeway, Joan. If you’re trying to escape, for instance-”

“If I’m trying to escape, then I’ve already broken our deal, haven’t I? If he touches me, it’s off. We’re done.”

She works on staring her down. She doesn’t fully understand what Moriarty is getting out of this deal with her, but she seems genuinely invested in keeping Joan alive but out of the way. She’ll have plenty of time to contemplate why that’s important to her during her imprisonment. Right now she just needs to negotiate enough terms that she survives it. Moriarty purses her lips briefly, and then turns a blazing smile on Moran. “Moran, please tell our esteemed guest that you won’t rape her, will you?”

“Or hit me. Or grab me. None of it,” Joan clarifies. She can’t leave loopholes.

Moran looks furious, but he grits out, “I will not sexually assault or physically assault Ms. Watson.”

Moriarty turns back to Joan. “Satisfied?”

Joan looks at Moran. He stares back at her, looking tense and oddly small, despite his bulk taking up most of the space in the doorway. She doesn’t trust him, and she doesn’t trust Moriarty, but she does trust Moriarty’s obsession with keeping Joan under her control, and if she thinks extracting a promise from Moran will suffice, then it will have to suffice.

“It will do,” she says shortly. 

“I’m an assassin, not a brute,” Moran spits, and then leaves the room, stomping down the stairs. She hears a door slam- presumably to his own bedroom- and finally lets her shoulders fall from her ears.

“He’s not lying,” Moriarty says mildly, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Moran is a man of honour, in his own way. He always executed my orders exactly. Never took a bit of side pleasure, despite many opportunities.”

Joan crosses her arms across her chest. “You’ll understand if I’m not reassured.”

Moriarty smiles her small, strange smile. “Of course. But it will have to do. Now, then, Joan, I really must be on my way. It’s my first day as a free woman, and I have a great deal of work to do in order to get caught up. Is there anything I can do for you, before I leave?”

Her lips are numb. She feels like the walls are closing in around her. “No,” she says. “Get out.”

Moriarty stands up and crosses to her, reaching up and caressing Joan’s cheek before she can jerk away. “I don’t think you’re in a place to be giving orders, my dear Joan. But I admire your spunk. Now get some rest. You must be exhausted.”

She waves languidly, walking out of the room and down the stairs. Joan locks the door behind her. Moriarty can assure her all she wants, but she will never believe her. Never trust her. She has all the power, and Joan has none, and Moriarty’s promises are only good until she changes her mind and wants something different.

She looks around her room, trying to reconcile the fact that this is her home now, and the horror of her situation finally sinks in. She fumbles for the chair, catching it quickly enough that she can guide herself down to the ground, rather than collapse, as she realizes just what she has given up. Her career. Her friends. Her family.

Her life.

She isn’t getting out of this alive. All she did was buy herself some time, protect herself from an immediate bullet to the head. That’s all. She bought time for herself, and the people she loves, and for Sherlock, but there is no light at the end of this tunnel, and she is just a walking dead woman.

She lets herself cry, finally alone and away from Moriarty and Moran and presumed snipers. She lets herself cry, quietly, sticking her face into her knees. She shakes, and cries, and silently wails in her head. This isn’t what she wants. She does not want to die.

She lets herself cry, and then she lets herself rage, getting up and breaking the lamp, ripping the clothes from the closet and tearing them apart with her hands, yanking the sheets from the bed and flipping the mattress off the frame, grabbing the small wooden chair and smashing it against the fireplace in her room, pulling down the curtains. She cries and rages into the small hours of the morning, distantly aware of the creaks and groans beneath her feet indicating that Moran is awake and moving around and likely listening to her as she destroys the mockery of her room, the pale imitation of her life at the brownstone.

And then, approaching four in the morning, she has no more tears left in her, and her anger and desperation and terror have left her hollow inside. She sits down on the floor, panting, looking around her at the broken furniture and the shreds of fabric and the blank, empty walls, letting herself breathe.

She doesn’t know what to do.

******  
Moriarty keeps her deal about giving her newspapers. Every morning, at least fifteen to twenty newspapers arrive, sometimes more depending on the publishing schedule of the weekly, biweekly, and monthly papers. She keeps her deal to the letter- many of the newspapers are written in languages she doesn’t speak, Yiddish and Korean and Arabic.

She doesn’t read the newspapers. She takes them up to her room and piles them up beneath the small window they’ve permitted her, nestled between the destroyed furniture and clothes that she hasn’t touched yet. She wants to go through them- she _needs_ to go through them- but she can’t get herself to do much more than scan the titles, some familiar, some not. She’s depressed, she knows, but she can’t work up the energy to do much more than sleep and eat and stare at walls.

But after a week of captivity, Joan feels an aching need to know something of the outside world, depression or not. When she takes the newspapers from Moran on day eight, she doesn’t take them up to her room and tuck them away, but forces herself to sit at the table in the breakfast nook, reading carefully through each one, even the ones in languages she doesn’t understand.

Eight days into her captivity, she reads her own obituary in the New York Times.

She reads the words blankly, and when she’s done, she reads them three or four more times. Then, numbly, she walks upstairs to her room and begins to dig through the back log of newspapers, kicking herself for missing something.

She finds the news article in the New York Daily News, about the body of an unidentified woman being found along the east shore of the Harlem River, across from the Columbia University campus. The body, she reads dimly, was badly decomposed and had evidently been struck by a commercial ship after death, given the state it was in. She checks the date. Five days after her meeting with Moriarty.

She finds the article about the body’s identification as “Joan Watson, NYPD consultant” in the New York Post dated six days after her meeting with Moriarty. She can hear an ocean in her ears as she reads that her body was identified by “business partner Sherlock Holmes.”

Then she looks back at the obituary. “Survived by mother, Mary Watson; father Hui Zhang; stepfather John Watson; brother, Oren Watson.”

She imagines her mother reading her obituary.

Joan stands up, gathers the relevant papers in her hand, and goes back downstairs. She pounds on Moran’s bedroom door until he flings it open, irritation evident on his face.

“What?” he snaps.

“I want to speak with Moriarty,” she says.

Moran snorts. “And I want a good lay, but neither of us are getting what we want today, love.”

“Don’t call me love. I want to speak with her. Now.”

She must sound or look like she means it, because Moran sneers at her, but fishes his cell phone out of his pocket. He shoots off a quick text, and then waits, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen. After a minute, the phone rings and he thumbs the accept button.

He listens for a moment, not saying anything, and then puts the phone on speaker. Joan reaches her hand out for it, but he shakes her head. Apparently she isn’t even allowed to touch a phone, let alone have one of her own.

“Joan,” Moriarty says, sounding delighted. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

“I’m dead,” she says flatly.

She hears a crackling sound that she thinks must be Moriarty giving a soft huff. “I’m afraid I don’t follow, my dear Watson.”

“I just read the newspaper. An unidentified body found dead in the river three days ago. Two days ago, body identified as Joan Watson. Today, my obituary. That wasn’t the agreement. The agreement was that I would disappear. Not die.”

Moriarty sighs. “Yes, I’m sorry, Joan, but I’m afraid we both underestimated Sherlock’s tenacity in finding you. Convinced you had been kidnapped, he was getting rather too close for comfort. And as I did promise not to kill him… well. Something had to be done. I thought this was the best solution. No one gets hurt, this way, and you were so very insistent that no one get hurt.”

“My mother,” she says through numb lips. “My brother. My friends. Sherlock. They think I’m dead. How are they not _hurt_ by this?”

“They’re alive,” Moriarty says, her tone losing its joviality and turning cold. “And if Sherlock had continued the way he was, I would have had to kill him. I suppose I can reverse my decision. Is your apparent death more important than his life? Do you want me to kill Sherlock, and reveal that the corpse is someone else entirely? I can do that. Tell me what you want, Joan. The choice is entirely yours.”

Joan closes her eyes, taking a deep breath. She can’t imagine the grief her mother has to be enduring right now, how Oren feels, if Emily is coping. And she wonders about the family of whoever the dead body really is, if they’re still missing their daughter, wife, mother, sister. She deserves to be known for who she is, not as an ersatz Joan Watson.

But Moriarty is right. She can’t allow her to kill Sherlock.

“No,” she says finally, her voice hoarse. “No. Leave me dead.”

“Good,” Moriarty says, warmth reappearing in her tone. “I thought you’d prefer it that way. I was just looking out for you, Joan. Moran, take me off speaker.”

He does, lifting the phone back up to his ear. He nods a few times, grunts in agreement, and hangs up. “You can get take out from any restaurant in the city,” he says shortly. “To mourn your death.”

A pitiful consolation prize, she thinks, and names a random restaurant, not caring at all about food. Moran pushes past her, already dialing his phone. She looks at the newspapers still clutched in her hands and imagines Sherlock standing over an autopsy table, looking at a body that must be enough like her own to fool him, and she wants to rip the newspapers apart, just like she did to her room.

But she doesn’t.

She goes back upstairs and looks at the room she ripped apart eight days ago. She hasn’t picked anything up. She’s been sleeping on the mattress that she knocked to the floor, surrounded by torn clothes and broken pieces of wood. She looks at the newspapers again and knows, without a doubt, that Moriarty is still playing some sort of game. And it isn’t the sort of game that allows seki.

She needs to put her grief to the side and focus on playing to win.

******  
When she walks into the kitchen in the morning, Moran is sitting at the table. He’s drinking tea out of a delicate tea cup, and the sight of it is completely incongruous with her idea of Moran the Mass Murderer. She ignores it, and slaps a list down on the table.

“I want these things,” she says frostily.

Moran raises an eyebrow, but takes the list, looking it over. He snorts. “Replacing all the things you broke, love? Don’t think Moriarty is going to appreciate your destroying her careful interior design.”

She doesn’t tell him not to call her love again. It isn’t important. “She said I could have anything I wanted. Get me those things.”

A dark cloud of anger passes over Moran’s face, and Joan wonders how it must feel, to be bossed around by a prisoner who is marked for death, and actually have to take her orders.

He doesn’t say anything, though, just turns his eyes back to her list, reading through it. She looks around the kitchen, and then starts opening the drawers, searching for something she can eat. She’s spent the past week in a haze, and Moran had brought her her food every day. She hasn’t spent any time in this room, and doesn’t know where anything is, or what they have.

“Yarn?” he asks. She looks over at him, her hands pulling down a box of Chex from a cabinet instinctively.

“If you keep reading…” she suggests.

His silence is disgruntled, but he goes back to reading. His eyebrows creep higher up his head, and he gives her an incredulous look.

“Knitting needles? Never took you for one of those knitting nuts.”

Joan holds her bowl of cereal close to her chest, having found the bowl and spoon and milk without remembering doing it. “I wasn’t,” she says. “But I’m going to have a lot of time for new things, now that I’m a prisoner.” She studies him carefully, taking in his posture and his face, the way he’s holding her list, the way he’s been acting since she arrived in this house, and decides to take a risk. “I’m sure you understand; I never took you as a gamer,” she says, remembering the sounds she’s heard coming from his bedroom.

His reaction is subtle, far subtler than Joan would have expected from a man like Moran, who murdered people with showmanship and killed a prison guard while singing. His hands tighten almost imperceptibly around her list, and the leg he’s been bouncing since she walked into the room stills for a beat before continuing. After playing Go with Moriarty for months, though, he might as well be wearing a neon sign saying he’s a prisoner too.

Joan notes that and eats her cereal while Moran looks at the rest of her list.

He doesn’t comment on anything else, just says, “Gotta talk to the boss,” and walks out of the room. She finishes her cereal and rinses the bowl out. It’s a familiar, comforting routine. She puts the bowl away automatically, and then pauses.

She did not set foot in the kitchen in the past week, but just now she navigated through it without hesitation, without any trial and error at all. Slowly, she opens the drawers and cabinets, looking at their contents.

It’s laid out in exactly the same way that she and Sherlock kept their kitchen at the brownstone.

It’s the same kind of cereals they had in the cupboard, and the same brand of milk that she buys. When she looks again in the refrigerator, there is even bok choy in the vegetable drawer. She was saving that, planning vaguely on making a nice dinner for her and Sherlock one night.

The familiarity is overwhelming, because it’s all wrong, and she grips the counter, trying to focus on what is different. The British man talking on his cell in the hallway has the wrong accent and the wrong footsteps, and there is no tortoise ambling across the table. The sunlight is coming in from the wrong angle, and the door leads out to the wrong room. She clings to the differences, and wonders what sick game Moriarty is playing, and how, _how_ she was able to replicate portions of the brownstone so well.

Impulsively, she opens all the cabinets and starts pulling out all the dishes, carefully rearranging them. She wants to hold onto the brownstone; when she finally gets back there, she doesn’t want it tainted with memories of this prison.

By the time Moran comes back, Joan has almost completely reorganized the kitchen. He scowls at her. “Moriarty gave the go ahead for your shopping list. Someone will be by later today with it all.”

She blinks. “You aren’t going to get it yourself?”

“Have to babysit, don’t I?” he snaps. “Put that back where it was; I like it in that drawer.”

Joan looks at the spatula in her hand. Her heart twinges. “I want it in this one,” she says, gesturing to the drawer next to the oven.

He steps towards her quickly, looming over her. “Put it back,” he says. His voice is taut and dangerous sounding.

But he can’t hurt her, and they both know it. His anger means nothing to her. It’s just anger. Joan stares up at him, refusing to lose ground in this moment, ignoring her body’s impulse to back away and get away from the threat. She can use this.

“Okay,” she says softly, and returns the spatula to where it was.

She watches him carefully as he deflates, shoulders relaxing.

He leaves the room shortly after, and she goes back to mixing the kitchen up. She thinks as she does so, letting her hands do their own thinking. She thinks about Moran, and what she’s read about him, about his apparent suicide and the murders he committed, about the bits of his encounter with Sherlock that she managed to get out of him.

Moran is true to his word, and the supplies she requested arrive by the middle of the afternoon. When the doorbell rings, she looks up from the paperback novel she pulled at random off one of the shelves, and watches as Moran emerges from his room off the hall and stomps over to the door. She doesn’t see whoever delivers her new furniture and clothes and knitting supplies and journals and books. She watches Moran’s fierce face and listens to his curt words. He takes her things from whoever it is, shoving them carelessly into the hall an armful at a time. When he drops her new nightstand, she considers making a sound of protest, but stifles it. Within a few minutes, the door is closed again, and Moran is standing alone, staring at the wood. Then he turns and looks at her through the archway that leads into the living room.

“I’m not taking it upstairs for you. You wanted it, you move it,” he says roughly.

Joan nods and closes her book. It wasn’t very good anyway.

Moran disappears into his room again, and Joan begins moving her things upstairs, careful to make as much noise as possible. When the armchair, nightstand, and small bookshelf are in her room, along with the bags of supplies, she locks the door and bangs about, moving things around and, as she does so, carefully pries up the one loose floorboard she found during the past week using the two thinnest knitting needles in her kit. She makes sure to shove furniture around every now and then while she wiggles and tugs the nails up, not wanting Moran to realize that she’s stopped moving around. Once the loose floorboard is pried up, she sets it back down and, in one more flurry of movement, pushes all the furniture around once more until her light, particle board bookshelf is over it. She puts the books she requested on the shelf- mostly medical texts, but also some novels- and then wills herself to focus on putting everything else away.

By the time she’s done, her room looks nothing like her room at the brownstone. It’s full of furniture, and almost cozy. She has a real nightstand, and bright, colourful curtains. The woods all match. It is so unlike home that she has to take several steadying breaths. Part of her wants to keep a touchstone, one familiar thing to link her to what she loves, to remind her of the good parts of her life.

Viciously, she squelches that part and focuses on building anew.

******  
Joan establishes a new routine.

In the morning, she lights a fire in her fireplace and does some yoga. Then she showers and dresses and comes downstairs, eating breakfast and reading every newspaper available at the kitchen table. She reads with a pencil in her hand so she can follow the words easily and do all the crosswords.

After breakfast, she does a sweep of the house, looking for bugs. Then she knits, usually in the living room, watching television. She doesn’t knit particularly well, and she often has to snip off the ends of yarn that she’s gotten hopelessly tangled. Moran mocks her, but Joan ignores him, collecting the small scraps of yarn so that she doesn’t leave a mess in their shared space.

In the afternoon, she writes in her journal, making sure to tuck herself out of the way while she muses on her time in the house and writes out her thoughts on what she wants to do when she gets out. When she’s done journaling, she reads paperback murder mysteries. Sometimes she reads portions out loud to Moran, who loudly critiques the killer’s methods while she critiques the detective’s skills. Sometimes, if there’s a match, they watch soccer (“Football,” Moran insists dogmatically), yelling at the players and snapping statistics at one another. Then she goes down to the basement and jogs on the treadmill she had brought in.

After dinner, she goes upstairs and takes a very long bath, at which point she writes in her secret journal, letting herself rage and write out potential escape plans. Usually, Moran goes into his bedroom while she’s lounging in the hot, soapy water, the journal balanced carefully on her knee. When she hears his bedroom door close, she gets out and hides her secret journal under the sink, wedged behind the pipes. She goes to her room, puts on something classical and loud, locks her door, and stops pretending to be a downtrodden prisoner.

Sometimes she writes in her real journal, the one she keeps hidden beneath the loose floorboard. The first journal is because she knows her captors will expect her to keep a journal. The second journal is because she knows that her captors will expect her to be smart enough to anticipate her journal being confiscated and read from time to time, and will thus expect her to keep a dummy journal. The second journal is the secret journal they’ll expect, one full of things that a normal captive wouldn’t want her captors to know.

The third, real journal, is full of her observations, things she’s noticed, about Moran or the other lieutenants that she sometimes sees through the windows. She writes down how often Moran calls Moriarty, and vice versa. She writes down Moran’s reactions to the mystery novels, the things he thought clever and the things he thought foolish. 

After she records anything she’s observed or deduced, she digs the yarn scraps out of her pockets and spreads them across the floor. She pulls out the newspapers she read in the morning, certain articles covered in seemingly accidental pencil smudges, actually careful markings. Those articles she quietly cuts out with nail scissors. There usually aren’t many, maybe one or two every few days. Sometimes they seem innocuous, other times they’re reporting on world events, and occasionally they’re details on a local crime. All of them, though, point to Moriarty in some way, or at least she suspects.

Once she’s cut out the articles, she carefully lifts her small bookshelf off her loose floorboard (the bookshelf is empty now, books scattered around her room in various stages of reading, or at least seeming so), opening it up. The underside of her floorboard is covered in newspaper articles, small bits of yarn connecting ones that she thinks have a particular link. They’re pinned carefully to the wood, secured with pins from the clothes she ordered, clothes she knew would specifically come with little pins tucked in them.

It’s not as good as a true wall of crazy would be, but it’s the best she can improvise, and it makes her feel like she’s managing to do something. Despite the crazed ramblings in her second journal, the plan isn’t escape. That would violate the agreement with Moriarty, and people would start being killed before she could do anything to stop her. The plan is to stop Moriarty herself, and she can’t do that without knowing what Moriarty’s plans are, what her goal is. What she’s headed towards.

When she’s done, she puts the floorboard back in place and then lifts the bookshelf once more, settling it gently and silently. She throws all of her newspapers into her fireplace so that no one can discover the absence of certain articles. They’ll burn during tomorrow’s yoga session. She turns off her music, loud enough to cover any small noises she makes while doing her nightly work, and gets into bed.

Every day, it’s the same thing.

She watches, and she waits, and she plans.

******  
 _Her mother is crying._

_Joan’s mother is crying, and Joan wants to hug her tight and tell her how sorry she is, that she didn’t know what else to do, that she couldn’t figure out any other way, but no matter how hard she tries she cannot reach her. She stretches her arms out, but they won’t reach. She yells, but no sounds comes out of her mouth. Her mother is crying, and Joan can’t do anything about it._

Joan wakes with a jerk, tears sliding down her cheeks. Someone- Moran- is banging on her door. “Let me in, you crazy bint,” he yells, and she flings her covers off, standing up and giving her room a cursory glance before she unlocks the door and opens it.

Moran’s face is red, his mouth turned down into his characteristic frown. “What?” she snaps, swiping the tears from her face.

He hesitates. “You were yelling,” he says.

“It’s nothing,” she replies shortly. She shudders, and wraps her arms around herself. Her bed is nice and warm, and the night air is chill where it touches her bare legs and arms.

“You were yelling that you were sorry,” Moran continues, and Joan resists the urge to groan and slam the door in his face. As much as she hates Moran, she needs to keep things civil. They’re trapped in the same house together, even if he’s ostensibly her guard. Keeping things civil makes life a little less awful.

“I had a nightmare.”

Moran doesn’t say anything for a long while, but he doesn’t move from her doorway either. She keeps herself still, even though part of her is itching to look behind her, to make sure she didn’t leave anything out and missed it before she opened the door. If she looks behind her, she might give something away. Might give him an idea that there’s something to look at. To look for.

She keeps her eyes fixed firmly on Moran.

“We all have nightmares in this house,” he says abruptly. It’s a shockingly honest, even intimate statement, and he must realize it because then he’s snarling in her face. “Next time keep your bloody mouth shut.” He storms off down the stairs, leaving Joan to watch his back in shock.

Once he’s slammed his bedroom door behind him, Joan closes her own door quietly, returning to her bed and thinking.

She’s been civil to Moran because she doesn’t want to disrupt things in the house, needs to keep things calm so that he isn’t watching her every move. Watching soccer with him, and reading mystery novels, those have been ways to gauge his strategies and how he thinks, but she looks at it from his point of view… she wonders what he thinks she’s been doing.

If Joan were asked, she would say that Moran is a killer, incapable of remorse or kindness. She saw photos of the crime scenes, and stood in one. Hired killer or no, he loved his work, and people like that aren’t capable of empathy. But she remembers the text Moriarty sent him, before he pretended suicide. The one about his sister, that apparently drove him to try and smash his skull in.

She supposes it might have been a code- sister for fake-your-death- but a code within a code, when Moriarty didn’t know they knew how to crack it? That doesn’t make sense. Which means it was a threat, which means that Moran does care about his sister, at the very least.

Joan thinks for a long, long time about what that means.

******  
She starts slowly at first. If she pushes too fast, Moran will catch on. He’s not a stupid man, even if he’s no Moriarty. He can’t be stupid, to avoid getting caught for so long even while executing complicated assassinations. He can’t be stupid because he works for Moriarty, and she doubts that Moriarty tolerates stupidity in even her lowliest of lackeys.

One morning, after reading through the newspapers and finding nothing that she’ll later save, she forgoes knitting and instead walks to Moran’s bedroom door. He spends most of his time in there. She’s long suspected that the house is watched with other means besides him, otherwise he’d be by her side all the time, monitoring her, making sure she doesn’t slip out the back door. She hasn’t found any bugs, in her room or otherwise, so she thinks it’s probably just other people.

She knocks. The door opens a few seconds later, Moran staring down at her, face blank. She holds up a deck of cards that she found in the living room. “Want to play a hand of poker?”

He gives her a suspicious look. “Why?”

She shrugs one shoulder. “I’m bored, and there’s nothing to do. I’m sick of knitting, and I’ve read all the mystery novels I can stomach. I like poker. Is that a good enough reason?”

Moran watches her, but then slowly walks out of his bedroom, closing the door behind him. “Thought you liked genius games, like chess and Go,” he says, following when she walks into the kitchen, sitting down at the table.

Joan rolls her eyes. “No, Moriarty likes those games. I played them in exchange for information.”

“Worked out well, I see.”

“I don’t see your situation being all that different from mine,” she retorts, and that shuts him up.

She shuffles the cards, and they don’t say anything for a while.

“What variant?” Moran finally asks.

“Five card draw?” she suggests.

He shakes his head. “I prefer Texas Hold ‘Em.”

She nods, and deals out the hands, then the flop.

“I’ll go easy on you,” he sneers.

She bites her tongue before she can say something she regrets. Everyone is always so certain that they’ll win against her. She’s yet to meet anyone that’s even been able to challenge her.

She wins the first hand easy. Moran looks almost impressed. “Never known a bird that actually knew how to play,” he tells her as he takes his turn shuffling the cards.

“I’m not surprised,” she says, sliding her two cards closer to her and taking a quick peek. Queen of diamonds, king of hearts. Not the worst hand she could have been dealt, but she has a ways to go before she can win it. Texas Hold ‘Em is as much luck as skill. “I doubt you spend much time around women, and I highly doubt that you’re asking them their hobbies when you do.”

They place the blinds, and then Moran lays out the flop. Two of clubs, ten of diamonds, queen of spades, and seven of clubs. It definitely has potential. She has a high pair at the very least, and the potential for a straight.

“I know how to talk to a woman,” Moran says.

“I’m sure you do,” Joan says blandly, and they place their bets. They aren’t actually playing for anything, not even pretzels like she had with Alfredo and Ms. Hudson… just four weeks ago, now. She thinks next time she does this, she’ll make sure there are actual stakes. She thinks Moran will like that better.

They play the rest of the hand in silence. When a jack and a nine are dealt into the flop, Joan has her straight, but Moran beats her out with a straight flush, jack of clubs high.

She looks at the cards suspiciously, then looks back at Moran, who is grinning, teeth full on display. “You’re good, Watson, but you don’t know when to _cheat_ ,” he says.

The rest of the hands they play split between Moran winning (sometimes through cheating, sometimes through honest, bizarre luck) and sometimes Joan. It’s one of the more interesting games of poker she’s ever played. And it’s more restful than any of the games she’s played in several months. She isn’t watching him for tics and patterns and behaviours- she’s just playing a game of poker. When they’re done, she collects the cards and retreats to her room, Moran to his.

It’s too early to make notes in her journal, so she doesn’t head for the bookshelf. Instead, she sits on her bed, legs folded underneath her, and shuffles the cards idly, trying to make sense of how he managed to cheat so easily. She’s a sharp eye, but she never saw him stack the deck or pull cards from elsewhere.

She’ll learn his tricks. She has time. They are going to be playing many more hands in the coming weeks.

Just because she isn’t playing games in order to buy information doesn’t mean they don’t have a purpose. Step one is to build rapport. Once she’s managed that, she can move on to step two.

******  
She wakes up abruptly one night (just shy of two months since her captivity began; she always knows when it is, there are no _one nights_ for her) when she hears someone moving around downstairs.

It isn’t Moran’s usual noises, on the occasions when he gets up in the middle of the night. She’s become intimately familiar with his thumps and groans and muttered curses. She can hear him, yes, but she can hear someone else too.

She lays perfectly still, straining to hear whoever it is. She can’t imagine that it’s Moriarty. She doesn’t think Moriarty plans on coming back to this house until she decides it’s time to kill her, or do something else with her. But they don’t have visitors, beyond the occasional errand boy who delivers things for her and Moran, and even they don’t step into the house, just stand on the doorstep and pass things inside.

She stays frozen as the noises move around and drift into the area of the house that she knows is Moran’s bedroom. She’s still frozen in her bed, clutching for any sort of noise, when the noises become louder. And then louder still. And then rhythmic.

Joan closes her eyes. Moran has apparently hired a prostitute. 

Suddenly, she does everything she can to avoid hearing anything.

She considers trying to go back to sleep, but the knowledge that there is someone else in the house, someone who isn’t connected to Moriarty at all, and who has been part of the outside world is just too tempting. She sits up, rubbing her face.

Because of Sherlock, Joan has spent a lot of time talking to and befriending prostitutes. There are some women she would even consider friends, in a way. Good acquaintances at least. She wonders if Moran hired one of the women that Sherlock frequently invites over. Hope seizes her heart momentarily, but she squashes it ruthlessly. Moriarty probably knows about Moran’s prostitutes, and therefore probably vets anyone who might come to the house.

Still. There is an outsider in the house, and there’s a chance- a small one- that she’ll know something.

Joan stands up, careful to avoid the noisy floorboards, and walks cautiously downstairs. She thinks Moran is probably too busy to be listening for her, but she doesn’t want to risk it. When she reaches the bottom of the stairs, she sits down. Moran doesn’t have a shower in his room; whoever is inside will have to come out if she wants to get cleaned up.

So she waits.

She doesn’t have to wait long, all things considered. Twenty minutes or so pass, and it goes quiet in Moran’s room. Another ten minutes pass, and a woman opens the door, slinking out, money grasped in one hand, her clothes in the other. She shuts the door, turns, and gasps when she sees Joan.

“Oh!” she says, and for a moment Joan can see her battling with wanting to be modest, or wanting to keep on her way. She decides to cut to the quick.

“Hey, can I borrow your phone?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper.

The woman raises her eyebrows. “What?’

“Can I borrow your phone?” Joan asks again impatiently. She realizes that it’s an odd request, although she’s been so long without one at this point that it takes her a moment to realize it. “He, um. It’s a game we play,” she adds, lowering her eyelashes in what she hopes is a coquettish fashion. “But my sister is about to have her baby, and…”

She leaves the rest to the woman’s imagination, and is gratified to see her soften. “Sure, honey,” the woman says. “It’s in my purse, one second.”

She adjusts her clothes in her hand, clearly deciding that modesty is overrated, and digs around in her large, knockoff designer purse until she finds her phone. It’s a smartphone. It’s perfect.

“I’m just going to go take a shower. Be done with it when I’m back?” the woman asks.

Joan nods. “Absolutely. Thanks. Hey, don’t tell him, please? If I’m good, I get to pick the next game,” she says. Her mouth tastes like ash.

The woman grins and gives her a wink. “You got it.”

She walks down the hall to the bathroom, and Joan sits impatiently until she closes the door behind her, and then hurries into the living room, already pulling up a browser on the phone.

But suddenly, she doesn’t know what to search for.

She thinks she should probably be searching for news items that the newspapers won’t cover, but her fingers freeze over the keys. She should look for references to Moriarty. She should contact Everyone.

Instead, she google searches Sherlock.

Before she left, when they were actively working cases together, it wasn’t odd to find mention of them in newspapers and social media sites at least once a week, sometimes more if they were working individually. But when she searches for Sherlock, the most recent news item is from just before she went away, a mention of them helping to bring the notorious Killer Evans to justice.

There are other ways to find Sherlock, though, online, and her fingers hesitate for only a second before she quickly starts putting in forum URLs that she never quite forgot. She knows his user names; she will be able to find him.

But he isn’t participating in any academic debates on his preferred forensic forums, nor is he talking criminal history with the serial killer groupies. She goes through site after site, and he isn’t on any of them.

Finally, she puts in a message board for conspiracy theorists. It’s a long shot, she thinks, but it’s the only place she has left to look.

He isn’t on his usual favorite threads, as best as she can tell, but what she does find astonishes her.

One of the most popular threads is titled JOAN WATSON ISN’T DEAD.

She covers her mouth with one hand and taps on the link with the thumb of her other hand.

There are over one hundred messages in the thread so far, and it’s only been up for five days. She skims through it quickly, but as best as she can tell, Thelxinoe12 is absolutely convinced that she’s alive, and they are rapidly convincing various members of the community.

She wants to read the entire thread in depth, to see if she left any clues that Sherlock would be able to find, if that’s why this Thelxinoe12 thinks she’s alive, but she hears the shower shut off and knows she’s out of time. She scrolls through quickly, looking for any of Sherlock’s screen names, or even for any that have his little jokes in them, but she finds nothing.

The bathroom door opens, and she scrambles, wiping her browsing history as quickly as she can. When the woman walks back into the room, Joan turns off the screen and stands up.

“Thanks,” she says.

“You’re welcome. Good news yet?” she asks.

Joan shakes her head slowly. “No,” she says. “No good news.”

She goes upstairs after the woman leaves and lays back down. But it’s a long time before she can fall asleep, because all she can do is wonder where Sherlock is, why he isn’t on the thread about her, what he’s doing, if he’s looking for her.

She shuts her eyes against the tears that well up. 

She wants to believe that someone is looking for her.

******  
“What’s your sister’s name?” Joan asks idly, lifting and looking at her cards. Today, three and a half months into her captivity, they’re playing blackjack. She has never played before; it happens to be Moran’s favorite game.

She thinks she has played the timing right. She’s been working slowly up to this, asking occasionally for personal information, providing it as needed. She knows about Moran’s service in the Royal Marines, could list off his tours and the things he did in each country. She knows some bare facts about his parents- working class, lived in South London, refused criminal ties even if it would make things easier, dead- and can easily recite his favorite foods, drinks, books. In return, he knows about her career as a surgeon, and why she stopped, and about her mother and stepfather’s separation (although she hasn’t told him about her biological father), about why she loves pho and hates burritos, what her preferred beer is, and her fondness for Zadie Smith.

She hasn’t given him anything he couldn’t easily find out from Moriarty. He’s given her small, meaningless secrets. Small exchanges, every time, so she could build up to this.

When Moran doesn’t say anything, she presses on, pretending as if she hasn’t asked anything unusual. “I have a brother, you know,” she says casually. “His name is Oren. He’s getting married in a couple of months.”

Moran continues to say nothing, so Joan gets another card. She checks again. She’s up to eighteen, and she doesn’t think the probability is good that the next card is a three.

“I wish I could be there, of course,” she says, thinking about whether or not she should get another card. “I really like Gabrielle. I was supposed to be one of her bridesmaids. I don’t miss that part much, though. Gabrielle has great taste, but her colour palette is a little loud for me. I don’t want to know what horror show of a dress she was going to put me in.”

It’s easy, prattling on about Oren’s wedding. She does know the dress Gabrielle intended for her bridesmaids, actually, and it wasn’t too bad. Definitely not Joan’s taste, but still, nice enough. Her chest aches with wanting, and she ignores it. She shouldn’t want things she can’t have.

She decides to stay where she’s at, and waves Moran’s hovering hand away.

“I didn’t spend much time with him, before all this happened,” she says as she flips her cards. “When he was in New York, I would maybe have dinner with him, if I could make time. But he was never my priority. Now…” she trails off, letting the thought hang in the air.

Moran clears his throat. “Her name is Viola,” he says roughly.

Joan wants to cheer, but she keeps her face still. After a beat, though, the name of his sister comes home, and she can’t stop her eyebrows from creeping up.

Moran sees her look and snorts. “Yeah, I know. My parents thought it would be posh. Never figured out what they were thinking, exactly.”

“Are you twins?” she asks, surprised. She can barely imagine Moran with a sister; she certainly can’t imagine him with a twin.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hated sharing a birthday as a kid,” he admits. “Used to try and lock her out of the flat so I could have the party to myself for once.”

Joan laughs, startled. If she can’t imagine Moran with a twin, she really can’t imagine him as a child with petty complaints against his sister.

“The clothes were probably the worst, though,” he continues, warming to the topic and giving her a lopsided grin. “Mum thought it was adorable, dressing her kids the same. Never mind that she was a girl and I was a boy. Spent half my time in pink and yellow growing up. Made Viola laugh all the time. She still pulls out photos, if prompted. Shows them off to all her coworkers.”

“What does she do?” Joan asks, her cards forgotten.

“Actress,” he says. “Played a governess on some period drama. Yours?”

Joan doesn’t believe for a moment that Moran doesn’t know the name of the period drama she was on. If he knows she shows pictures of them as children to her coworkers, then he knows her show. But she accepts the redirect anyway. They have time. She can’t rush things. “He’s a senior account executive for a marketing firm. I don’t actually know what exactly he does, but I know he travels a lot.”

“Can put a strain on a relationship,” Moran says wisely. “When I was with the Royal Marines, my sister and I didn’t talk much. I couldn’t get away, and she was busy acting.”

Joan nods. “We try to make time-”

“- but it doesn’t always happen,” Moran finishes. He flips over his hand. “Twenty-one. I win.”

She doesn’t bother to point out that he cheated, because it’s obvious and doesn’t even need saying anymore. She just sighs and pushes her cards over to him. “Another hand?” she asks.

Moran shakes his head, collecting up the cards and tossing them into a heap in the center of the table. “Have better things to do,” he sneers, and walks out. A second later, Joan hears his bedroom door close.

Later that night, while Wagner pounds away in her room, Joan sits down on the floor and takes a hard look at her Floorboard of Crazy. Most of the things that are pinned to it, in increasingly haphazard and sloppy stacks, are things that potentially relate to Moriarty. With careful hands, she unpins them from the board itself and instead ties relative things together with the yarn that once connected them. Then, pulling out a piece of paper from her journal, she writes _Viola Moran_ and pins that to the Floorboard of Crazy.

She won’t stop looking for evidence of Moriarty’s work, but she has a new goal for the time being. Find Viola Moran.

******  
She works on teaching herself different languages while she’s trapped.

In part it’s to keep her brain fresh, to prevent her from feeling stagnant. If she treats her imprisonment like an extended sabbatical, she finds it easier to resist the urge to scream. Pretending that she’s just taking the time to learn all the things she’s ever wanted to know lets her sleep a little better, gives her fewer nightmares.

But it’s also because, confronted with reams of text in languages she doesn’t know in her daily newspapers, she worries that she’s going to miss something.

The foreign language newspapers are the only ones she doesn’t burn on a regular basis. Moran notices her setting them aside one morning, and she brushes it off with a self-conscious laugh, saying, “I’m working on teaching myself what they say; no better way to learn than in a practical fashion, right?”

Moran shakes his head. “That’s ridiculous,” he replies, and disappears into his bedroom.

The next morning, Japanese, Bengali, Arabic, Spanish, and Polish dictionaries are waiting on the kitchen table for her, next to her stack of newspapers.

“Thanks,” she tells Moran, flipping through one idly. “Think you can find me a Yiddish one, too?”

“These aren’t enough to start with?” he asks, gesturing to the stack.

She shrugs one shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere, am I? It will give me something to do.”

The look he gives her is hard to read, but she thinks she detects a hint of jealousy. She can’t decide if he’s jealous that she possibly has the ability to actually learn different languages- though she doubts it; she’s heard Moran speak at least three different languages while on his phone with people she presumes are connected with Moriarty’s organization- or if he’s jealous of something else. She can’t imagine what it would be.

******  
The thread JOAN WATSON ISN’T DEAD has almost two thousand responses the next time Joan checks it, when Chloe, Moran’s preferred prostitute, is in the shower. She has spent most of her time frantically googling Viola Moran and coming up empty. With only a few minutes left, though, Joan can’t stop herself, and goes to the forum.

Thelxinoe12 has apparently made a strong case, because while some of the early comments on the thread are disbelief, the later ones are all about what Joan is doing while faking her death. Popular opinion currently places her in Tibet on a top secret CIA mission.

It’s utter nonsense (apparently, Thelxinoe12 thinks so too, judging by their acerbic comments), but she’s still just relieved that there are some people, at least, who think she may be alive. In Tibet, but alive.

She still doesn’t see any of Sherlock’s screen names.

******  
“Hey,” Chloe whispers.

Joan looks up from her perch on the stairs, where she is waiting. She and Chloe have come to an arrangement of sorts, that Chloe hands her her phone when she walks out of the bedroom, and Joan gets it for as long as she’s in the shower. It’s worked well so far. Chloe hasn’t asked any awkward questions about why Joan is still there, or why she still needs a phone, or why it all has to remain so secret. She just gives Joan her phone, takes her shower, and is on her way.

“Look, do you want my phone before I go in with him? It would give you a little more time…” Chloe asks, trailing off and lifting a hand in a helpless gesture.

She wants it, badly, but her stomach twists at the idea of Moran catching Chloe passing her the phone. She’s living dangerously enough. She can’t risk someone else. “I… I don’t…” she starts, and Chloe shakes her head sharply, cutting her off.

“He takes my coat, when I come in, and hangs it up. I can leave my phone in my pocket. I’ve done it before, before you started borrowing it,” she says. “It would be okay. He’d never know.”

Joan wonders about that, but it’s a generous offer. It’s dangerous just for Chloe to make it. If she gets caught using the phone, she doubts Moran will confine his anger to just Joan. But having more than fifteen minutes on the phone every week or so would make finding Viola Moran so much easier. And even though she has plenty of time, Joan doesn’t want to spend the next several years of her life trapped in this house.

“That would be great,” she finally agrees.

Chloe smiles at her and Joan takes the phone, not bothering to watch her as she continues down the hall and into the bathroom. They were past that on the third or fourth visit.

She doesn’t waste any time in picking up her search for Viola Moran. She doesn’t know how she has avoided the search engines, but Joan cannot find any reference to a Viola Moran that could possibly be Moran’s sister. There are Viola Moran’s but they’re American or Jamaican or twenty or dead, and while she wouldn’t blame any sister of Moran’s for faking her background, there is only so much one can do, and she can’t be any of the Viola Morans she’s found so far.

This time, she’s doing a search for British period dramas that have governesses in them. Unfortunately for her, it turns out the British like their period dramas, and they definitely like governesses. Period dramas, as she learns, can encompass all sorts of time periods, and while the role of a governess helps narrow it down a little, it doesn’t do enough to make slogging through the search results easy. And she has to wonder- how many adaptations of _Jane Eyre_ does the world really need?

It doesn’t take long before she hears Chloe turn off the water, which gives her about five more minutes. She doesn’t hesitate this time, weighing the options of continued searching against her own small, pathetic hopes, just taps in the message board URL and searches for Sherlock.

There’s still nothing. She closes her eyes against the rush of disappointment, and then continues on, clicking on what she thinks of as Her Thread.

There aren’t too many new responses, and people are still debating about her being in Tibet (although she notes that now the issue at hand is not if she’s in Tibet at all, but rather, if she’s working for the CIA or INTERPOL or MI6 while in Tibet), so she scrolls more towards the beginning of the conversation and takes the time to read Thelxinoe12’s replies.

Thelxinoe12, unlike most of the conspiracy theorists that Joan has worked with or watched over the past two years, is rational and calm. They present their evidence for Joan’s being alive in terms of the suspicious nature of her death, and the condition of the body.

_Everyone knows that Watson was working with her partner, S Holmes, against Jamie Moriarty_ , Thelxinoe12 wrote in one thread. _It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Moriarty, upon escaping, would want her out of the picture. But with the body distorted and partially destroyed by water and commercial ships, leaving body identification to dental records and the presence of one particular birthmark, you have to wonder if it really was Joan. You have to. Moriarty could have made a spectacle of her death, as a warning, and instead she leaves it to chance? That doesn’t seem like the Moriarty we all know._

It’s smart. Well-reasoned and thought out. She sees a few people argue that Moriarty hated Joan too much to give her a death that would leave her intact, warning or no warning, chance or not. Another argues that Joan’s body was never meant to be found, that Moriarty made a mistake. Thelxinoe12 replies to each comment with a series of thought out explanations as to why they’re wrong.

Thelxinoe12 believes in her.

She stops herself before she emails the thread to Sherlock. It’s too easy to trace back to her, and that would lead to open season on her family and friends. But she wants to. She wants him to read the thread and talk to Thelxinoe12 and have Thelxinoe12 shoot down every single one of his arguments, even the inevitable “I saw her body myself.” She wants, more than anything, for Sherlock to believe.

******  
When her searches for Viola Moran continue to come up empty, Joan adjusts her plan, and looks at the calendar, trying to remember the day she needs to put it into action. It ends up falling toward the end of her fifth month of captivity, and though it will be hard to wait that long, she knows she can do it.

In the waiting period, she focuses on building her language skills and on her continuing rapport with Moran. He spends less and less time in his room now.

Half way through the fifth month, less than a week until she can make the next move, he drags a Wii out into the living room and hooks it up to their television. Joan doesn’t pay much attention, just glances up from her books whenever he swears.

When he’s done, he rubs his hands on his pants and then looks over at her. “You can join me, if you want,” he says shortly.

Joan doesn’t really care about video games, but her brain is resisting conjugating in Yiddish, and it’s the first time Moran has taken the first step in something like this, so she sets her books aside and says, “Sure.”

She expects some sort of game where you kill things, but to her surprise, Moran pops _MarioKart_ into the console. “Huh,” she says, unable to keep her surprise in.

Moran hands her a controller, already secured in a plastic wheel. “What?”

“Guess I expected something like Call of Duty or… that game where you drive around and kill people.”

He snorts. “Grand Theft Auto. And no. I lived through those in real life. Don’t need that stuff in my games, too.”

She guesses that makes some sort of sense. She couldn’t watch her favorite old mystery television series, _Columbo_ , after she started working with Sherlock, mostly because she had enough murder and mayhem in her day job (and because she found them a little silly).

She doesn’t say anything as Moran gets the game set up, until he says, “You can be Princess Peach.”

“Uh, no,” she says, and fiddles with her controller until she gets an idea of how to move it around. She hasn’t played on a Wii before. “I’m Yoshi, thanks.”

“Fine. I’m Bowser.”

It’s a surreal conversation, far more surreal than their conversations over cards or books or soccer. Those don’t involve them selecting cartoonish avatars and cars.

The first race she loses, badly. Moran laughs hard as he beats her and all the computer characters. On the second race, she does even worse, coming in dead last, even behind the computer characters. The third race she does better, but not by much.

Moran is laughing so hard she thinks it must be hard for him to see the screen. “Finally, something the great Joan Watson is terrible at!”

She considers the controller for a second, then looks at Moran. “You got a Nintendo 64 in your room?”

He gets up without replying and walks into his bedroom, emerging minutes later with the familiar looking console. He hooks it up. “Mario Kart, I’m guessing?”

“Yes,” she says firmly. “I’m Yoshi.”

Ten minutes later, Moran is staring at her in disbelief. Joan smiles. “Ever wondered what a group of stressed and exhausted surgeons do on their breaks?” she asks primly.

******  
She wakes up, and it’s time.

Rather than do her yoga, she lays in bed for a long time. She lays there well past the time she would go down to eat breakfast and read her newspapers. She lays there until she hears Moran come out of his bedroom. She shuts her eyes and waits.

It only takes another twenty minutes or so before she hears Moran stomping up the stairs, and then he’s banging on her door.

“All right in there?” he demands, voice loud and gruff, but Joan imagines she can hear a note of real concern in it- concern for his life, not hers, if anything happened to her.

“Fine,” she croaks out.

There’s silence on the other side of her door, and then, without warning, Moran flings it open. “Spot inspection,” he says, and walks into her room.

Joan doesn’t move. She knows she looks terrible. Her eyes are probably red, and her hair is a mess. She forces herself to keep still while Moran paces around her room, throwing glances at her every few seconds. She pretends she isn’t watching him. She stares at her hand instead, tucked up by her face.

“You sick?” he asks.

She shakes her head, but doesn’t say anything.

He gives her a suspicious look, but nods. “All right,” he says, and leaves, stomping down the stairs.

Joan waits another ten minutes before she gets out of her bed, forcing herself into a defeated shuffle. Rather than just close the door that Moran left open, she heads downstairs. She’s hungry, but she pretends she isn’t. Detectives sometimes have to go days without sustenance; it was something Sherlock tried to drill into her at length. She refused to join him in his “skill building fasts” as he called them. She never needed to. She had been a grad student. She knew plenty about not eating.

She sits down on the sofa and then flops onto her side, staring blankly at the television.  
Moran sits down next to her after a minute, clutching the remote in his hand. He turns on the television, switching the channel to ESPN.  
“It’s my brother’s wedding today,” she says, trying to sound as numb as she possibly can. It isn’t as hard as it should be.  
Moran grunts but doesn’t look away from the television.  
“I should be there. I’m his baby sister. I have responsibilities,” she says, still staring at the screen. “It’s my job to make sure he doesn’t get too full of himself, you know?”  
Moran still doesn’t say anything. Joan lets the moment pass, pulling the blanket from the back of the couch around her. She considers how to get what she wants, what she’s hoping for and planning on. Everything relies on getting Moran to crack, in this moment. And she knows what will do it, she thinks.  
She doesn’t have to dig very deep to get the tears started. She prides herself on being able to compartmentalize everything, to a degree that her psychologist once called ‘worrisome.’ She has only cried once since Moriarty stuck her here and twice in the years since she began working with Sherlock. But there is a wealth of material buried away inside of her, and when the tears begin streaming down her face, it’s almost a relief.  
“He’s my brother,” she says again, and her voice cracks.  
Moran jumps to his feet and walks out of the living room. For a moment, Joan panics, thinking that her plan failed, that this won’t work, but then he’s back, clutching a DVD set. He crouches in front of the television, putting the DVD in the player, and then comes to sit back down on the sofa.  
A title screen comes up. _Lordly Manors_  
Joan feels something fluttering in her heart.  
“What’s this?” she asks, sitting up and wiping her face.  
“My sister,” Moran says, never taking his eyes off the screen. “This was her first big show. She did some small roles, here and there, some theatre, but this, this was her big break.”  
She watches the people on the screen, trying to figure out which of the women is Moran’s sister. None of them really look like a Viola to her. And she can’t see Moran’s jawline or eyes or nose in any of them.  
“I don’t-”  
“She isn’t on yet,” Moran interrupts, anticipating her question.  
Joan wipes her eyes and settles back to wait.  
The opening credits start, and she watches familiar names and familiar faces appear, with the occasional ones she doesn’t recognize. She takes special note of those. But then Moran jerks next to her, sitting ramrod straight, and points at the screen.  
“That’s her,” he says, pride evident in his voice. “That’s my baby sister.”  
Viola Moran is a pretty blonde woman, small with big blue eyes. She has Moran’s cheekbones, and his ears, and the general angle of the jaw. She also has a different name. Splashed across the title card is _Violet Smith_.  
She almost asks, but thinks better of it. Instead, she clears her throat and says, “Fraternal?”  
“Lucky, that,” he replies. “Can you imagine a woman who looked like me? Ugly bird. Viola takes after our mum. Except for the ears. Those are all Dad.”  
Joan swallows tightly. Moran is puffed up with joy at watching his sister’s acting, and he’s almost… relatable, in this moment. Step Two of her plan is almost complete, depending on what else she can find out. “Oren is the one who looks like Mom in my family,” she offers. “I lean more towards my father.”  
“Genetics are funny things. Now be quiet. Viola comes back on in a minute.”  
Joan sits quietly, as instructed, and they watch all eight episodes that way. The show is a bit dull, she thinks, with its focus on family dramas of wealthy white Victorians, but Joan has to admit that Viola, and her role, is the highlight of it all.  
“She’s good,” she says when the last episode closes, with Viola’s character having to decide if she wants to remain with the family she’s working for, or if she wants to seek a new position where she might fit in better.  
“The best,” Moran says fiercely. “I have the next season.”  
It’s a statement, but she accepts it for what it really is. “Let’s watch it.”  
He explodes off the couch, heading for his bedroom, and Joan watches him go. She knew Viola Moran had the possibility of being a weakness of his- Step Two: Find an exploitable weakness and determine its viability- and now that she’s finally found out her name, the name she uses, she might have better luck finding her. If her gut is right, then Violet Smith disappeared some time ago.  
Then Moran is back, eagerly putting in a new disc, and Joan leans back again. The show might be a bit boring to her, but she is a bit curious to see what Viola’s character will choose to do.  
******  
When next she has Chloe’s phone, Joan frantically types in “Violet Smith actress” and digs among the search results. There are plenty of interviews and reviews, going back the past six years that her show has been on the air, but she finds a not-entirely-surprising dearth of recent items. Like lots of British shows, there’s a lengthy hiatus between seasons, and while season six finished airing almost two years ago, and the show isn’t officially cancelled, there is no known air date for season seven.  
Joan thinks her gut is right, but she won’t rely solely on that. She has time. She can verify it.  
She goes to the conspiracy theory forum and, knowing she’s taking a risk, creates a user name. She dredges up all the old hacking knowledge she learned as part of her training with Sherlock, and spoofs the IP address of Chloe’s phone so that it looks like it’s in LA. She goes to the main page of the forum and calmly creates her first post.  
 _WHERE IS VIOLET SMITH?_  
Joan has limited resources, but the people on the forums don’t, and she trusts them to find a kernel of truth amongst the lies.  
******  
It’s thirteen days before Chloe is back. Joan has to stop herself from rushing down the stairs to greet her and take her phone, and instead waits for the reassuring sounds of Moran closing his bedroom door before she makes her move.  
Her forum post has grown a great deal since she posted it. Close to one hundred replies- eighty nine- and some of the thoughts on Violet Smith’s whereabouts are credible, in Joan’s estimation. She reads every answer to her question, and comes up with a general idea of what happened.  
Close to two years ago, Viola Moran- Violet Smith- was seen walking down the street from her trendy Hammersmith apartment. She had a meeting to negotiate her contract for the next season of her show, but never arrived at the appointment. Her agent received a letter saying that she was taking some time to herself for mental health purposes and that she wasn’t taking her mobile for the duration, but she would check in. Since then, there have been three sightings of her, all in Tower Hamlets, all near Bromley Street in particular. She has also called in to her agent once a month, like clockwork, always stating that she would be back when her health improved.  
Joan wonders how many women Moriarty has locked away in houses, waiting for some unknown date of release.  
She posts something else in thread, something about how she believes that Violet Smith was actually an alien imposter that the government had finally recaptured, just to make sure her credibility is ruined, and then logs out.  
She very deliberately doesn’t look at the thread about her. She wants someone to believe she is alive, but she can’t keep feeding on that hope. It’s dangerous, and she has work to do.  
******  
With Step Two complete, Joan is ready to begin Step Three. She places a new order for books through Moran, and asks for certain DVDs. While waiting for those things to arrive, she sets the stage by switching her routine slightly, bringing her Moriarty-approved laptop down from her room and sitting on the couch, typing.

“What are you working on?” Moran asks her third afternoon of her new routine.

She sighs. “A while back, I started writing… a memoir, of sorts, about the cases Sherlock and I worked together. I guess I thought I would go back to writing it.”

He leans over her shoulder. “ _The Case of the Catholic School Kidnapping_ ,” he reads, and snorts. “Terrible title.”

“I never said I was a good writer,” she says, feeling oddly defensive. “I’m working on it.”

“What happened in that case?” Moran asks, and Joan tells him about the child that was spirited away from his private Catholic school, only to discover that he had been taken by his half-brother, who was jealous of the attention their father gave him, and that their father knew about the whole event.

“There are some messed up people in this world,” he says when she’s finished, and she gives him a strong enough look that he smirks at her and wanders away.

Over the next few days, there are multiple arrivals of mystery novels and true crime books. Joan returns to their old habit of reading passages from books aloud to Moran. All the books that she’s reading are about kidnappings, ransoms, and blackmail. Moran goes from talking about how he would do things differently to barely talking at all within five days.

She’s close. She can feel it.

******  
Chloe’s phone is a familiar weight in her hand, and she pulls up the conspiracy forums. She doesn’t have much to look for anymore, nothing that she needs to focus on, now that she’s in Step Three, but it’s a habit. To her surprise, there is a message waiting for her in her forum inbox.

Her heart goes cold. It’s from Thelxinoe12.

She tries to determine if there is any way that Thelxinoe12 is actually Moriarty, having fished for her and finally caught her violating their agreement, but she discards the idea. Trying to convince people that Joan’s alive wouldn’t serve any purpose of Moriarty’s that she can see. In fact, Joan is pretty sure that Moriarty’s plan rests on Joan being ‘dead’ in order to cripple Sherlock. She’s played enough games with the woman at this point to be able to work out, generally, what her goal is.

She clicks on the envelope icon and, holding her breath, reads the message waiting for her.

_Violet Smith is Viola Moran. Does that mean something to you? I think our interests may be similar._

Joan breathes out. It isn’t an accusation of her identity, or a threat from an unknown Moriarty operative. Just an inquiry to a potential ally.

She closes out of the message without responding. She can hear Chloe finishing up in the bathroom and begins the process of wiping her history from her phone.

When Chloe comes out, Joan hands her the phone and turns to go up the stairs, but Chloe catches her wrist.

She looks torn for a second, but then, in a low, serious whisper, she says, “Do you need help?”

Joan shakes her head, and tugs on her wrist, but Chloe’s grip is firm. “I can help you,” Chloe insists. “I have friends, and I know some private investigators, I can call a raid down on this house if it would help you. Just tell me. Do you need help?”

She’s touched by this sudden concern, and she wonders how long Chloe has been working up to this.

“I don’t need the help you are thinking of. And you’re already helping me in the way I need,” she says honestly.

Chloe bites her bottom lip. “I’m worried about you,” she says.

“Don’t be,” Joan says. “I’m handling it.”

For the first time in six months, Joan feels like that might be true.

******  
The trouble with implementing Step Three is that, if she hasn’t laid the groundwork properly, everything could fall apart and Joan could be back to square one. So she’s held off making any further moves, beyond keeping kidnapping and blackmail at the forefront of Moran’s mind, and making sure he knows about the nine or ten cases she and Sherlock resolved in their time together that involved those elements.

She doesn’t want to admit that she’s scared, but she is. She’s terrified.

She stares at her Floorboard of Crazy and looks at what she’s pieced together about Viola Moran, all from smoke and mirrors, and shadowy images on forums, and knows that she has the right piece of the puzzle to make everything change, but she can’t make herself take the next step. It’s too big of a risk. She could end up dead.

But, Joan reflects, she’s basically already dead, and if she ever wants this to end, if she wants to have a definitive win instead of seki, she needs to make her move.

She spends the day playing video games with Moran. She’s good, but he’s still better, so he wins most of the games, putting him in a good mood. She relies on that good mood when, later that evening, she sets down a plate of food in front of him and says, “I can get your sister back, you know.”

Moran’s reaction is violent, but it isn’t directed at her. He jolts back, looking at her with astonishment, and then growing anger, and then he leaps to his feet, pacing in front of her.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your sister. Moriarty has her, doesn’t she?”

Moran’s face goes pale, and then starts reddening again. Joan presses on, ruthless. “Somewhere in the world- in London- your sister is just like me. Sitting in a house, locked away, with guards. I can get her back for you, Moran. I’ve done it before. You know I’ve done it before.”

“My sister is none of your concern,” he growls, but he hasn’t walked away yet, and he hasn’t started yelling.

“Your sister is why you can’t leave, isn’t she?” Joan asks. “It’s not just your sister that’s trapped; it’s you. You’re as much a prisoner as I am.”

“That’s not-”

“Don’t insult us both by pretending that’s not true,” she sneers. “Moriarty took your sister in order to _tame_ you. I know how much you hate her, Moran. I know you wouldn’t willingly work for her again unless she had something on you. She set you up to take a fall, and then, when you were finally going to get even, she threatened the one person you care about and instructed you to _kill_ yourself. She’s played you from the beginning.”

“That’s not true!” Moran yells, and he takes a step towards her. Joan holds her ground.

“Do you think she’s actually going to live up to her word, Moran? Let us live? Let _Viola_ live? You know as well as I do that Moriarty plans to kill us. Are we really going to sit here and wait for her to do it? Patiently, like good little boys and girls?”

They’re ugly words, ones Joan would never use if she weren’t pushed, but she can feel a gap widening, a gap that leads to freedom, and she can see it in Moran’s eyes.

“I can get her back, Moran. I can get us out,” she says, and this she says softly, almost gently.

“How?” he asks. Joan wants to whoop with victory. It isn’t a promise, yet, but it’s a start.

“We leave,” she says simply, “and we get your sister.”

“You don’t know where my sister is,” Moran says harshly, but he sits back down at the table. She sits across from him.

“She’s been seen near Bromley Street and Commercial Road,” she says easily, silently thanking the conspiracy nuts for their details and obsessions. “She’s probably being kept in an apartment near there- they wouldn’t let her out for long, and they wouldn’t let her go far.”

Moran gives her a suspicious look, but then scowls suddenly. “Bromley and Commercial? I know a bloke that keeps a flat there. One of Moriarty’s people. She had me lay low there once.”

“We can start there.”

“We can’t just leave. The second they find us gone, they’ll kill Viola.”

Joan expected this. “I’ve been here six months. They checked in with us every two to three days when I first arrived. But now it’s more like once every ten days. In ten days, we can get to London, and we can get your sister out.”

Moran looks at her for a long time, and licks his lips. “What about you? I know she’s holding Holmes over you.”

She almost smiles. She’s been planning this for months; she didn’t forget about the risk to Sherlock. “When Moriarty finds out you’re gone, we play it like you took me and are using me as collateral.”

Moran’s eyebrows shoot up. “Turn her game around on her.”

“Exactly.”

He whistles lowly. “Joan Watson, you are a devious woman,” Moran says. “I understand now why she took you out of the picture.”

She nods. She can’t disagree.

“What makes you think I won’t just turn around and do that, though? What makes you so sure that I won’t kill you once I’ve gotten what I’ve wanted?” he asks.

“Because you will still need me.”

“Yeah?”

Joan folds her hands on the table and leans forward. “You know as well as I do that Moriarty will find you and kill you, and Viola, for betraying her. Getting your sister is only the first step of my plan. The next step is to dismantle Moriarty’s network. Between what you know, and what I can deduce, we can do that. We’ll leave her scrambling, with nothing and no one to support her.”

“What’s a spider without her web?” Moran asks softly.

Joan nods. “And then we take care of Moriarty.”

She leaves it vague enough that she knows Moran will take the bait. He wanted to kill Moriarty once before, she doesn’t think he’ll hesitate at the theoretical opportunity to do it again. She has other plans, but he doesn’t need to know that. He just needs to agree.

“You’re willing to risk Holmes’ life on this?” Moran asks. “And yours?”

“Yes,” she says without hesitating.

Moran’s grin is broad and sharp.

“I’m all yours.


	3. 3

******  
She doesn’t harbor any delusions. She knows Moran is not a safe partner in this. She knows he’s a murderer. She doesn’t allow herself to ever forget that, even when he’s yelling at Bowser to drive faster, or cheating egregiously at cards with a shit-eating grin, or making comments about her cooking. He’s a bad man.

But Joan is practical, and she needs a bad man in this. She needs someone who knows Moriarty’s network, or at least knows where to start with it. She can read newspapers and deduce Moriarty’s hand in things until she’s blue in the face, but none of it will ever match the straightforward knowledge of having actually worked with someone like Moran has.

She has contingency plans. She isn’t going into this blind.

She tells herself that every night as she lies in her bed, while she and Moran wait for a check-in phone call from one of Moriarty’s people. They won’t leave until immediately after the next one, to give them the optimal amount of time.

“I can do this,” she whispers to herself, a quiet mantra to calm her growing anxiety. “I can do this.”

******  
They can’t go right away. Moran spoke to one of Moriarty’s people only three days ago. If they want to maximize their time, they need to leave right after the next phone call.

Joan preoccupies herself with figuring out what she can reasonably take with her. She rules out her journals, and her Floorboard of Crazy. There’s too much about Moran in those, and she doesn’t need him to find out just how much she’s studied him. She decides that it’s probably safe enough to bring some of her most promising leads on Moriarty, the whispers she found hidden in newspaper articles across the city. She tucks them in the pockets of her jeans, and then tucks the jeans in her go bag. Then she burns the rest. And, just to be sure, she flushes the ashes down the toilet, in five separate batches over the course of two days.

She needs one more thing, and it will be risky.

Moran has Chloe over on the fifth day after the last phone call. Joan sneaks out her cell phone once she goes in, and while she checks the usual websites, it isn’t the phone she wants tonight. She sits on the stairs and waits.

When Chloe comes out and heads to the bathroom for her habitual shower, Joan follows her. Chloe turns back and raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t stop walking. Instead, she walks into the bathroom, waits for Joan to follow her in, and then closes the door.

“I need a favor,” Joan whispers.

Chloe nods, serious. “Of course.”

“I need a phone. Of my own. Just a burner phone, it doesn’t need to be special. Can you do that?”

She purses her lips. “What if he doesn’t want another date?”

“He will.”

Five days later, when Chloe is back, she hands Joan a simple phone, one that looks just like the ones Sherlock kept in boxes at the brownstone. For a moment, Joan’s heart aches, but she pushes it aside even as Chloe takes the phone from her.

“Wait-”

Chloe’s dark look silences her, and she watches as Chloe adds a number to the phone. “This is my number. If you need anything else, call me. I mean it.”

Joan studies her. Chloe is small, petite, with blonde hair and blue eyes and a permanent pout to her lips. She is also a mom- she can see it in her hips, in her belly, in her hands- and a good friend (so many contacts in her phone, most of them not clients) and a worrier. The lines under her eyes, the nails bitten down, the nibbled lips all speak to it.

And she’s fierce.

“You don’t even know my name,” Joan says.

“I had a sister like you,” Chloe says, the pain fleeting but strong enough to make Joan wince. “I would have done… just. Use the phone. Use it, if you need me.”

Chloe smiles, a lopsided, sad little thing. Joan finds herself agreeing without thinking about it.

“Okay. Okay.”

******  
The expected call comes the day after Chloe’s last visit. Joan doesn’t like to think about how close she came to never getting her phone, and so she pushes it from her mind as Moran grunts irritably at whoever is on the other end of the line. She watches him from the couch. When he hangs up, he turns and looks at her, leaning against the door frame.

“You ready?”

She gets up and goes upstairs, listening to Moran disappear into his bedroom below her. She grabs the go bag she’s kept tucked between her mattress and bed springs- containing one extra set of clothes, her knitting, three blank pages of paper, and a phone carefully sewn into the lining, swaddled by yarn- and heads back down the stairs, where Moran is waiting with his own bag.

“Let’s go,” she says.

Moran leads the way out of the house. She squints at the bright sunlight, surprised to find that it’s summer. She’s lost half a year. Her feet keep expecting snow.

“Keep moving,” Moran snaps, and grabs her elbow, dragging her along. She contemplates tossing him off, but decides that if anyone is watching, this will just add to the idea that he stole her from Moriarty. She’s sure Moriarty has security cameras watching the place, even if her lieutenants seem to have grown complacent about watching them.

He leads her down the street and then, casually, hails a cab ( _no whistling for him,_ she thinks, and crushes the thought) and “assists” Joan in, almost gentlemanly. He gives the cabbie an address, one Joan thinks might be in Queens, and they’re off.

They don’t talk on the ride. Joan had told Moran she could contact Everyone in order to get the personal documents they need in order to get on a plane, but Moran had laughed. 

“I’ve been a criminal longer than you’ve been a detective, Joan. I have my own contacts.”

“That Moriarty knows about?” Joan had demanded.

“They’re not worth anything to her. Too small. And despite what you think, New York isn’t her preferred stomping grounds.”

So she doesn’t know where they’re going, having entrusted this part to Moran. Foolish, maybe, but they don’t have his sister yet, and until they do, Joan thinks she can trust him to act solely for the benefit of the mission. She clutches her go bag.

The cab pulls up next to a dilapidated building that, despite its appearance, appears to have a number of people coming and going. It takes Joan a moment, but she realizes it’s a club. Apparently one that conducts business during day hours.

Moran leads her past the bouncer, who doesn’t give them a second glance. “Now, you’ll be quiet,” Moran says. “This is an old friend, and he don’t like new people. It’s a risk, bringing you here, but he owes me, so it’ll be all right. Just don’t talk.”

Joan doesn’t speak while Moran conducts their business with a short, balding man with a nasally voice and hairy knuckles. She doesn’t speak while two of his people take her photo and carefully create a fake ID for her, even if she wants to ask them questions about their process, and if they know Ladonna, who is Sherlock’s fake ID woman. She doesn’t talk while a passport is made for her, complete with a few authentic stamps to make her appear a regular flyer. She says nothing when Moran’s friend promises that, by the time they reach LaGuardia, they’ll have an entire background in the system, in case they get pulled aside.

Joan doesn’t speak again, in fact, until they are sitting on the plane that will take them to London, her heart pounding frantically.

“Do you see anyone you recognize?” she asks.

“No,” Moran says shortly, shoving their new travel bags in the overhead (thoughtfully provided for them by Moran’s friend’s people when they got out of the cab at LaGuardia).

She nods, and closes her eyes, but can’t escape the feeling that everyone around them is in Moriarty’s employ, and that she’s laughing somewhere at Joan’s gullibility in believing that she would ever escape.

Joan grits her teeth. She can do this.

******  
The flight is uneventful.

Joan jumps every time a flight attendant comes near her. Moran sleeps the entire way, snoring noisily. She wonders how he can accomplish that level of peace. She’s been planning on something like this for months, and she still can hear her heartbeat in her temples.

“Nervous flyer?” the woman seated on her other side asks.

“Yeah,” Joan lies, her throat dry. She used to love to fly. She can’t relax enough to enjoy this one.

Once they land, Joan grabs her carry-on and hurries off the plane. It’s three in the morning in London, and she doesn’t want to waste any time in getting to their safe house, which Moran arranged. She hates how much the first part of her plan relies on Moran, but she knows it’s necessary.

Moran makes a phone call while they’re still in the terminal. She stays close to him, wanting to make sure nothing is said that could be the set up for a trap. He says, “We’ll be out in five,” and then hangs up, and despite the paranoia flooding her brain, Joan can’t come up with any code that could be contained in such a short, straightforward conversation.

Once they’re outside of the airport, Moran leads her to a small, beat up car that looks like it needs to be demolished or sold for scrap. There’s a woman behind the wheel, a cigarette in her mouth, her hand tapping out the beat to a song that Joan thinks is by Plan B- her lessons in British rap were as haphazard as Sherlock’s knowledge of it, though she spent a lot of time on youtube once it became clear he wasn’t going to be a great tutor on the subject.

Joan gets into the backseat as Moran slides into the passenger side of the car. “Joan, this is Hadja. Hadja, this is Joan.”

Hadja looks at Joan in the rearview mirror as she pulls away from the airport, raising an eyebrow that has been meticulously braided. “How do you know Sebby?” she asks.

“Business partner,” Moran says shortly before she can reply.

Hadja’s suspicious look increases, her dark eyes glaring at Joan. “I don’t approve of your business partners, Sebby.”

“Reluctant and largely unwilling business partner,” he clarifies, which goes a long way to make Hadja’s eyes soften.

“I see. I’m sorry to hear that, Joan.”

“We’re making it work,” she says. “How do you know Mo- Sebby?”

Moran glares at her, but it makes Hadja laugh. “I like her,” she tells Moran. “Shame she’s unwilling. I know Sebby from our primary school days. He was a neighbor. He’s been my best mate since we were four,” she informs Joan.

Joan wonders if Hadja still considers Moran her closest friend, considering his years as a murderer, but she decides not to ask. She’s a friend that has no connection to Moriarty, and as far as Joan knows, those are few and far between with Moran.

“Thought you got killed over in the States,” Hadja says to Moran, and he begins to tell her everything. Joan closes her eyes and leans back in the seat, uncomfortable though it may be, and tries to will herself to relax. She feels oddly safe with Hadja, the woman’s immediate distrust of Joan upon finding out she was working with Moran making her seem reliable and smart. She thinks of Emily, and wonders if she’ll take Joan’s eventual reappearance as easily as Hadja appears to be taking Moran’s. Knowing Emily, she doubts it. She expects tears and hysterics and recriminations and the silent treatment for at least a month.

She smiles. It’s nice, being able to think about those things as an eventual reality, rather than a maybe.

******  
Hadja installs them in her own flat, as small and dingy as her car.

“You’ll sleep on the couch,” Hadja says to Moran, pointing to a futon that’s seen better days. Then she looks at Joan. “You’ll sleep with me.”

Moran makes a grumbling sound, but he’s clearly used to Hadja’s ways, because he beds down without actually complaining. Joan follows Hadja into another room.

Her bedroom is surprisingly nice, done in soft pinks and purples, with two twin beds. “My brother stays with me sometimes,” Hadja explains at Joan’s surprised look. “And I like his dumb butt more than Sebby’s.”

“What do you do for a living?” Joan asks, mostly to be polite.

“I’m a lawyer,” Hadja says. “Mostly pro bono. Hence the digs.”

“A lawyer? Really? But… you have to know a little bit about Moran,” she says. “What he does.”

Hadja scowls and sits down on a bed, the one that is clearly hers. Joan sits down across from her, drawing her legs up and folding them like a pretzel. “I know perfectly well that Seb is a murderer, and a vile man. And I hate it. I hate him, most days. But he sat with me in the hospital when my mum had cancer, and he beat up the boys that picked on my brother, and he helped me study for my exams, and he sent me flowers when I got my job at my firm. I hate him, but there’s history.”

Joan can’t imagine letting history tie her eternally to a murderer, not when she had a choice. But Sherlock kept writing to Moriarty, so she supposes there is something. “I see.”

“You don’t have room to judge until you’ve lived it,” Hadja says, her scowl twisting up into a small, bitter smile. “Anyway. All I’m doing is providing a ride and a bed. When you wake up, I’ll be at work. And when I get home from work, you’d better be gone. Otherwise I’ll call the police. That’s the arrangement. Always has been.”

Joan nods, and Hadja relaxes and starts to tell her some details about the cases she works, primarily in helping tenants fight back against their landlords, and in housing reform. Normally, she might find it interesting, but she finds herself nodding off- which, if she thinks about it, might have been Hadja’s plan. Joan lets herself tip sideways, resting her head on a shockingly fluffy pillow, and drifts off to sleep.

******  
“Wake up.”

Someone is shaking her shoulder, hard- Moran, Joan realizes, as she wakes up. She opens her eyes, and he’s standing over her, dressed and with a backpack slung over his shoulder.

“We have to go,” he says. “Hadja will be home in an hour. It’s time to get Viola.”

Joan sits up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and missing, in a sudden, painful stab, the way Sherlock chose to wake her up in such inventive ways. Obnoxious, but inventive. “What time is it?”

“Four in the afternoon.”

She hesitates, but then gets up. As much as she wants to wait to do their reconnaissance until it’s dark, Hadja’s threat of police sounded real, and she doesn’t want to test her. “We may not be able to get her out tonight,” Joan warns.

Moran’s look is dark. “We’re getting her out tonight, or you won’t see the sunrise.”

It’s a feeble threat, and she can’t stop herself from rolling her eyes. He needs her right now. It’s after they get Viola that Joan has to worry.

“Get out so I can change,” she says.

When he’s gone, she closes the door and opens up her go-bag, tucked still intact in the carry-on luggage Moran’s friend had given them. She pulls out a change of clothes, and when reaching in to grab her socks, her fingertips brush against the concealed cell phone.  
For a moment, she’s tempted. Just one quick phone call, to let someone know she’s alive.

But it isn’t time. So she pulls out her socks instead.

Moran is waiting for her, impatiently checking his watch when she walks into Hadja’s living room. “What’s the plan?” he asks. “How do we figure out which flat they’re keeping her in?”

“First we check the apartment we know about,” Joan advises. “If she isn’t there, then there will be signs, somewhere, of her occupancy, and we just look for them until we find them.”

“Doesn’t sound quick.”

She rolls her eyes. “Detective work never is. Despite what you might think, Sherlock and I don’t just magically know things. There’s a lot of tedious work involved. It’s effort.”

He grunts, but leads her out the door.

Hadja’s apartment was less than a mile from where Joan thinks they’re keeping Viola, but they choose to get a cab rather than walk. Walking would let too many people see them. The first cab Moran hails, Joan sends it away.

“Why’d you do that?” he snaps.

“Because,” she says, “if we’re being watched, then they might try to pick us up. Never take the first cab that comes along if you’re worried you might be under surveillance.”

Moran snorts, but he hails another cab, only giving her an ugly look when she sends that one away too. The third cab she lets them get into, and gives the driver an address a block away from their destination, according to the maps she studied. The cab drops them off, and they walk the rest of the way.

The street she thinks Viola Moran is being kept in is fairly sterile and plain. There are flats, all in a tan brick that makes it seem monotonous. There are cars parked on both sides of the street, and pink and purple trash cans sitting docilely next to people’s homes. Little iron fences separate stoops from sidewalk. It’s incredibly cramped, Joan thinks, and she lived in a New York City brownstone.

“Which one is it?” she asks Moran.

“Down here,” he says, and they start walking.

She feels a tingling down her spine, wondering if a sniper is on the roof, or assassins around the corner. They’re close, so close, to accomplishing this small, first step in her plan. They’ve been gone from New York for just slightly more than twenty-four hours, and she has to hope that no one has noticed yet. That they have a few more hours of grace before the really hard part begins.

“Here,” he says, slowing down as they walk past one apartment. Joan doesn’t ask him how he knows- they all look the same to her. “How do we tell if she’s here?”

Joan stops and bends down, fussing with her shoelaces as she examines the apartment in question. It looks the same, to her, but she takes a deep breath and looks again.

Most of the apartments on this street have nice, lace sheers covering the windows. This flat has blinds that are drawn. Several of the stoops have children’s toys or newspapers still on them, or garbage piled high and spilling out of the top of the trash cans. This stoop is meticulous. A number of the apartments have lights on outside, waiting for someone to come home from their work day. There are no waiting lights here. There are satellite dishes all up and down this side of the street, but scattered and occasional- this flat has two, oddly. There are no window boxes or potted plants.

None of the apartments have all of the factors she can see, but all of them have at least one, even the ones that are obviously vacant. This has nothing, no personal features outside of two very strange satellite dishes.

“She’s here,” Joan says, standing, and hopes she’s right. All the things she’s noticed could also point to a recluse or even just one of Moriarty’s men, like Moran said lived there. But if Viola Moran were in another apartment, Joan thinks that apartment would reflect the bland lack of personality that this one has, and everything else looks lived in and loved.

Moran starts for the door, but Joan stops him. “Not now,” she says. “It’s light out. There’s a café at the end of the street. We’ll wait.”

“Fine,” he says, and they continue walking.

The café at the end of the street is busy, but they manage to find a little table toward the back. Joan gets herself a latte, and Moran orders a black coffee.

“How could you tell she’s there?”

“The other apartments look like real people live there. That one has no personality to it. And it has two satellite dishes, which is weird,” Joan explains, taking a sip of her latte.

Moran studies his coffee. “The bloke that lives there, his name is Woodley. He’s a mean man.”

“So are you,” she says bluntly. “And you never laid a hand on me. Moriarty is good at keeping her dogs in line.”

He gives her an angry look, but he doesn’t argue with the description. They sit in silence for a while, the bustle of the coffee shop washing over them, and Joan finally decides to ask him something that’s been bothering her.

“Is this something she does a lot? Locking people away?” she asks. Moran gives her a blank look, and she continues. “Well, she didn’t kill me, just put me where she could find me and faked my death, left you in charge of watching me. She didn’t kill Viola-”

“Because I would have killed her,” Moran interrupts.

“Yes, but still. She didn’t kill Viola, just tucked her away and sent some excuses to her agent about needing a break. Her scam with Sherlock, with Irene, was that Irene had been kidnapped by Moriarty and that Moriarty- using you- faked her death. Does she do this a lot?”

Moran hesitates, his big hands making his coffee cup seem small. “She keeps most of the organization in the dark,” he says finally. “The people I know, it’s mostly by accident, or because they were keeping a watch on me for her. And I was an assassin, not a kidnapper, so I can’t say for sure. But yeah, I’d say she does this sometimes. With people who are assets.”

He stops talking long enough to go get another coffee, leaving Joan to consider what he said. When he comes back, he goes on. “It’s chess, see? She’s moving us around the board the way she likes us. Some of us are better off dead, so she takes care of us. Others are better off being used for something else, so she puts us in storage until she’s ready.”

She thinks about that, fussing with her napkin as she does. Moriarty doesn’t play chess. It’s boring and routine. But Moran is right, it feels more like chess than it does Go- especially since Moriarty always sneered at seki.

She’s missing something, she just can’t figure out what yet.

******  
She makes them wait until it’s dark out. Moran is anxious to get started, but Joan knows that going without darkness to mask some of their movements is a mistake.

“They’ll be expecting us to come in the dark,” he argues. “That’s when everyone comes. If we go by daylight, we take them by surprise.”

“We’ll be taking them by surprise no matter what. They don’t actually know we’ve gone yet,” Joan points out, which may or may not be true, but it does succeed in shutting Moran down. She buys him another coffee- decaf, this time- as a sort of apology. She doesn’t know, really, if Moran is truly capable of compassion and empathy, but it’s his sister. If it were Oren in that apartment, she doesn’t know if she could be stopped.

Once it’s dark enough, Joan gathers up her stuff and heads out of the café, Moran at her heels. “What’s the plan?” he asks. “I used to be a sniper, you know, and I have some guns stashed.”

That is definitely not the plan. “No,” she says. “We go by stealth. This is going to tip our hand, but the longer we can go without Moriarty realizing we have your sister, the better. It looked like there were some small yards behind the block of flats, with trees- if we can access those, we might be able to get a look inside.”

“And then we go in?” he asks, sounding almost hopeful.

“Depends on what we see,” she says, looking around them. The street isn’t too busy, but it isn’t empty. “If there’s a room full of people, then we’ll need to regroup, come up with something else.”

“If she’s alone?”

“I’m not making any promises,” Joan warns as they turn onto Belgrave St, “but if she’s alone, or we think we can manage whoever is inside, then yes. We can get her.”

Moran leads her down Belgrave St, and then into the Lighterman Mews. There are some gaps between the flats, and he takes her through one, hopping the fences until they reach a space greener than anywhere else she has seen in London so far.

They walk quickly and quietly through the yards, the light from televisions making various homes look eerie. Moran draws to a halt in one yard, somehow able to keep straight which is the apartment they need, and there is, thankfully, a small, sickly looking tree near the house.

“Boost me up,” she whispers, and Moran cups his hands, lifting her easily into the air. Joan grabs the branches of the tree, hoping it isn’t rotted or too weak to hold her, and guides herself into it, scrambling as quietly as she can to the branch that is closest to a window.

While the windows in the front of the apartment were carefully concealed with blinds, this window has blinds that are a little more haphazardly drawn. There is a small crack at the bottom, and Joan leans down carefully so she can see through it.

It’s a bedroom, and Joan can see Viola Moran sitting at a desk, writing, clear as day. She waits, letting her upper body rest on the tree branch. It doesn’t seem likely to break, so she lets herself relax, watching the room.

It doesn’t take too long before someone else enters the room. The angle isn’t ideal, and she can only see the man from the waist down, but it’s clearly a man, wearing work boots and jeans. The muscles in his legs are relaxed- he isn’t expecting trouble. Joan thinks he says something, because Viola shakes her head and gestures to whatever she’s writing, her mouth moving. Joan squints- she’s pretty sure she said something about dinner. It’s just not a good angle.

The legs stand there for a while, talking to Viola, Viola occasionally turning enough for Joan to read her lips (not hungry, doesn’t like turnips, really wants to focus on her writing, promises to eat some cereal), and then the legs leave. She remains where she is and is rewarded by a second set of legs entering the room just moments after the first set, these legs dressed in black Dockers and Converse.

This time, when Viola talks to the man, her arms are crossed and her lips keep slipping into a fierce scowl that reminds Joan that yes, Viola is related to Moran. It’s uncanny. Her responses are short- “No” making a frequent appearance.

Joan turns her focus back to the legs. They’re thicker than the other set, and they rock back and forth with apparent agitation. Not, if Joan had to guess, about potential invasion- just irritation at the captive. The Converse shoes are scuffed and torn, clearly a relic or put through their paces. Interestingly, the work boots that the other man wore looked relatively new and unscathed.

Soon, the Dockers and Converse legs leave. Immediately after he goes, Viola puts her head down on her desk, rubbing her temples.

That’s all Joan needs. She starts to shimmy her way back down the tree, Moran grabbing her around her waist once she’s low enough and lifting her down the ground. Her skin crawls where he touched her, but she has to admit it was useful. She was always better at getting into trees than getting out of them.

“There are two men,” she whispers. “Viola is there.”

Moran snorts. “Only two? Fine. Think you can get us in the flat?”

She holds out her hand. “Lockpicks?”

Moran thinks the kitchen is in the front of the apartment, so Joan sets to work on the back door, taking a deep breath to calm herself and her hands. The skill hasn’t left her yet, despite months of disuse, and she hears a faint click when she gets the tumblers in place and aligned. Gently, she eases the door open.

“Be quiet,” she says to Moran, but it’s too late. He’s already barging through the door, shouting something that she doesn’t catch. Joan follows him quickly, jamming the lock picks in her pocket and looking for the stairs so she can get Viola while he deals with the two men.

Joan sees the quick impression of two startled men coming out of the kitchen, but she ignores them, turning up the stairs and running. She hears one of them say, “Wait, Sebastian Moran? Aren’t you Sebastian Moran?” and keeps her eyes forward. She doesn’t want to know what Moran is going to do to them.

Viola is standing in the doorway of her room when Joan reaches the top of the stairs, and Joan pushes her back in, closing the door behind them.

“My brother’s finally here, isn’t he?” Viola asks.

It maybe isn’t the best introduction, but Joan supposes there really aren’t best introductions available when, technically speaking, you’re both hostages of a murderous woman like Moriarty. “He is,” she confirms. She holds out her hand, feeling ridiculous. “Joan Watson. It’s nice to finally meet you, Viola.”

“Violet,” she corrects, taking Joan’s hand. Her hand is cool and thin, the bones small even in Joan’s hand. “I changed my name, legally. I prefer Violet, if you don’t mind.”

“I understand,” Joan says. “Moran will only be a minute, and then we can get you out of here.”

Viola- no, Violet- moves further into her room, sitting on the edge of her bed and folding her hands. She’s prettier in person, she thinks, and while there is an air of damaged bird about her, Joan thinks it’s an act. A big one, if she had to guess. She saw the way she interacted with Legs Two. “Do you work with my brother?” Violet asks.

Joan laughs slightly. “No. Not at all. I was taken by the same person who took you, actually.”

Violet sits up straighter. “Then why are you here?”

There is a crash downstairs. She had told Moran, explicitly, not to kill anyone when they were waiting in the café. She hopes he remembers his promise. In any case, she figures they probably have some time and, still feeling absurd, she sits down at the desk and explains everything. About Moran working for Moriarty (though she keeps his exact role very vague), and Moriarty using Violet as leverage to keep Moran under her thumb. About Joan’s history with Moriarty, and how she came to be stuck in a house with Moran. About manipulating him (framed as “convincing him”) to get Violet and end Moriarty once and for all. It takes a while, and she feels drained afterwards, but Violet is giving her a warmer look than before.

“The men downstairs, their names are Carruthers and Woodley. Seb shouldn’t hurt them too badly. If you want to take down this Moriarty woman, they might know something,” Violet advises. “They had a number of people at the flat, and Woodley was often on the phone. It sounded like he was taking orders.”

If Violet was looking at her more warmly after Joan’s explanation, Joan finds herself feeling more disposed towards this woman after that. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop him,” she says honestly, feeling slightly sick at the admittance.

Violet stands, dusting off her shorts. “Not a problem.” She walks out of the room, heading down towards the crashing. After a moment, Joan follows, stunned at Violet’s attitude.

The living room is partially trashed, things destroyed and torn apart in the wake of Moran’s anger. Joan is somewhat impressed at how much damage he did in such little time. Violet has her hands on her hips and is standing in the doorway. “Seb Moran! I told you not to hurt him! We need him! For information!”

Joan looks past Violet to Moran, who looks… almost sheepish. “Sorry, Vi,” he says, and puts one of the men- the one with the work boots- back on the couch. Other than what will probably be two black eyes, he looks relatively undamaged, if unconscious. “Where’s the other one?” she asks.

Moran jerks his head towards the back of the living room, where Joan sees a door, probably to a closet. She walks over and opens it, and immediately closes it. That man will probably be fine, but he’s too damaged at the moment to be any help.

“You’re always rushing in, never thinking,” Violet is saying to Moran, sounding annoyed. “You’re always doing that.” Moran starts to say something, but then Violet suddenly, and without warning, dissolves into tears, rushing forward and wrapping her arms around him. “Thank you for coming for me,” she says, and whatever control she was holding onto disappears completely.

“I’ll go find some tea,” Joan says mechanically, and goes to find the kitchen.

******  
In the kitchen, Joan takes a moment for herself and throws up in the sink.

She can’t tell if it’s nerves and stress that makes her vomit, or if it’s from seeing a man shoved in a closet, a man whose face she couldn’t see any discernable features in because he was beaten so badly. She wipes her mouth with a shaking hand, and then turns on the sink to wash away the evidence.

Once that’s done, she finds a kettle.

******  
When Joan returns to the living room, three mugs clutched in her hands, Violet is calmer and sitting on the couch, Moran next to her. The man is still on the floor, unconscious. Joan passes a mug of tea to Violet first, who takes it with a grateful smile, and then puts Moran’s in front of him. She retreats to the doorway, clutching hers. She needs the reality of English Breakfast right now, even if it’s PG Tips.

“I’m sorry,” Violet says. “It’s just been a lot.”

Joan nods, understanding. She doesn’t have the luxury of tears right now, but she understands. She jerks her chin at the man on the floor. “We need to deal with him.”

Moran grunts. “Don’t worry. I will _deal_ with him.”

“No. No killing,” Joan says.

“He knows things,” Violet adds. “He wasn’t very careful, him or Woodley, about making sure I couldn’t hear things. Two years… they got sloppy.”

“He has information we can use, Moran. You said it yourself- Moriarty keeps the organization fairly in the dark. Certain people know certain people, and that’s it. He might know people you don’t,” she says.

“I don’t like it, the idea of keeping him alive,” Moran says. “He’ll tell Moriarty.”

“Probably,” Joan admits. “But we can use that.”

She jots out her general plan, Moran scowling but nodding the entire time, and Violet agreeing to do her part. Once it’s all worked out, Joan walks out of the room and goes to sit on the steps, just out of sight of anyone in the living room. From there, it’s just a matter of waiting.

It takes about an hour, but Joan finally hears the man- Carruthers, apparently, if the other is Woodley- stirring.

“Paul Carruthers,” Moran says loudly. There’s an answering groan. “Paul. Carruthers. Wakey wakey. Time to talk.”

“Who are you?” Carruthers says, his voice hoarse. There is a slight noise of fabric, and she thinks it must be him sitting up. “Woodley said- you’re Moran?”

“I am,” Moran says. “And you’re Paul Carruthers. Now that we’ve gotten to know each other a bit, how about you answer some of my questions?” There’s silence, in which Joan imagines him nodding, since a moment later Moran says, “How long have you worked for Moriarty?”

“About ten years,” he says slowly.

“In what capacity?”

There’s a pause. “I watch kidnap victims, mostly. Make sure they behave.”

“That’s not true,” Violet says. There’s a clink as she puts her tea down, and footsteps as she stands up and walks toward Moran and Carruthers. “You’re a con artist, aren’t you? He doesn’t think I remember, but I do. He was on my set, a long time ago, series one. Took my friend Barbara for all she was worth. Got her to believe he was some long lost relative.”

“That’s not for Moriarty,” Carruthers says.

“Also not true,” Violet says immediately. “Because I heard you finessing a plan with Moriarty on the phone, about a month back. You were going to be working on someone in the House of Lords.”

“Better start answering our questions honestly, I think,” Moran says threateningly.

“Why should I tell you anything?” Carruthers bursts, impatience and terror making his voice go thin. “You’re obviously just going to kill me.”

“I have no intention of killing you,” says Moran.

“Moriarty will, then. And she’s… creative.”

“If you talk to us, I can help you avoid her.”

“Like you did? Nice scar there, mate.”

Joan holds her breath, hoping Moran won’t retaliate. It’s a foolish hope- she hears a dull thud, and a squeak from Violet. “Sorry, love,” he says to the side. “I don’t want to hurt you, Carruthers. I already did my piece, and it was Woodley I had the real issue with. Moriarty will kill you no matter what for letting Vi here get free- question is, do you want her to be after you with someone helping you, or without?”

It doesn’t take long for Carruthers to lose his nerve, and then he’s giving names and jobs and what little he knows. And it’s only a little- just like Moran, it doesn’t sound like Moriarty told Carruthers much about her entire operation. But he tells Moran about some jobs he was supposed to have, and who he was meant to work with, and some other people he knows on the side that he found out also worked for Moriarty, because the criminal community in London just isn’t that big for people to be completely unaware of people’s employers.

Joan carefully jots it all down.

“Now how are you going to help me?” Carruthers demands when he’s done.

“Got a passport for you, with no connection to you or me.”

That’s not quite true- it’s one of about three dozen that Moran picked up while Joan was sleeping from various forgers, so it has at least passed through his hands.

“Got a list of countries that Moriarty doesn’t have any projects in.”

Also a bit of a stretch. Joan had put together a list of countries where she couldn’t see Moriarty’s fingerprints anywhere, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have something that Joan just hasn’t been able to figure out yet. It was disheartening to put together that list- there are only about fifteen countries where Joan couldn’t see Moriarty involved. Fifteen, in the whole world.

“It’s going to take Woodley some time to talk, so you’ll have a head start.”

Joan shuts her eyes and pushes the images from her head.

“Basically, run fast and hide well, and we’ll keep her too busy to care about you.”

There’s another dull thud, and Moran walks into the hall, Violet behind him. “He’s out. Got what you need?”

Joan looks at the list in her hand. It’s only half a page long, and she thinks she should find it depressing. But she doesn’t. It’s a beginning. “Yeah,” she says. “Let’s go.”

******  
In the taxi that the three of them take to another safe house of Moran’s, Moran hands Joan a phone. “Got that from Carruthers.”

She should, of course, immediately look for any indication that Moriarty knows that she’s gone, or even go through the contacts and the texts to pull out any additional information she can, but instead she types in the URL for her conspiracy message boards. She can take a few minutes for this. She hasn’t looked at them in weeks.

She has more messages from Thelxinoe12 waiting for her.

_Viola Moran is Sebastian Moran’s sister. What does that mean to you?_

_Sebastian Moran died for Viola. Why is she important?_

_Sebastian Moran worked for Jamie Moriarty before he died. Does Viola also work for her?_

She thinks Thelxinoe12 has to know someone in the department or have access to files, or maybe know Sherlock, to know about Moran protecting Viola. She opens up a message box and aims her thumbs, but stops. This isn’t the time to blow it all. They’ve gotten this far, and they need to know if their deception worked before she can even begin to _think_ of risking contacting someone. She closes the message box, and goes to the general threads.

She doesn’t bother with the thread she started, because she knows the answers to that now. Instead, Joan goes back to Her Thread, curious to see how far the conversation has morphed since she last looked at it.

They currently think that she gave up detective work, converted to Islam, destroyed her old identity in a weird spiritual thing that is not, as far as Joan is aware, part of any Islamic practice at all, and is currently in Mecca on pilgrimage. She wonders how people come up with these theories. It’s impressively bizarre.

She closes out of the internet and begins looking through Carruthers’ phone for anything of interest.

******  
Moran takes them to a hotel, a seedy, rundown place that doesn’t accept credit cards, only cash. Joan watches him hand it over. They’re going to run out of money soon, and they’ll need to find a way to replace it. Joan has a few ideas, and Moran isn’t going to like any of them, but he’ll survive.

Violet falls asleep almost immediately upon lying down on one of the two double beds they got. “You’re sleeping with her,” Joan says flatly, reaching over and taking off Violet’s shoes.

“Course I am,” Moran says. “She’s my baby sister. I’m not letting her out of my sight.”

Joan sits down on her bed, the weight of the day crashing down around her. She desperately wants to lay down and go to sleep, maybe for the next ten years, but there is still business to discuss. “What does she know about you?”

Moran doesn’t play dumb and pretend he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “She’s thinks I’m SAS. That I carry out covert military operations.”

Joan supposes that could make sense. “Wetwork, then?”

“Yeah, she knows about that. What does she know about you?”

“The basics. That I’m a detective who was working against Moriarty, and Moriarty decided to remove me from the picture.”

They sit there quietly for a while, Moran rummaging through his bag. Joan watches him and, knowing what is coming next, says, “Don’t.”

Moran pauses. “What?”

“You’re going for your gun, to kill me. You don’t want to do that, because the moment I’m dead, you have no collateral for Moriarty, and she has no reason to keep you alive.” Moran gives her a weighty look, and then takes his hand out of his bag.

“You think this’ll work, then?”

Joan closes her eyes and takes a steadying breath. “I think the two of us have a chance. A small one. You want her gone just as bad as I do, Moran. Remember that.”

Moran gives her a long, considering look, and then grunts, pulling out his gun. With her watching, he deliberately takes the magazine out. “Here,” he says, handing it to her. “So you can sleep soundly.”

She snorts, putting it on the nightstand. “As if you didn’t have eighteen other ways to kill me without this, but I appreciate the gesture.”

She kicks off her shoes and peels off her socks, scooting back on the bed until she’s leaning against the headboard. Moran shifts Violet and takes off his own shoes, grabbing the remote and turning the television on. “You mind?” he asks.

She shakes her head and worries at her lip. Carruthers’ texts were all in code, with only a few in regular English. And those, from what she could tell, were regular conversations, with no relation to Moriarty’s network. The code is similar to the one Moran had, years back, but there are certain things that have changed, enough that while it looks the same, it’s only a superficial resemblance. She hasn’t cracked it yet, and without her reference materials, she isn’t sure if she’ll be able. 

“Do you know who Moriarty’s code writer is?” she asks.

Moran glances at her, but then returns his stare to the television. It’s playing football game. She isn’t surprised. “Not by name. Pretty sure I met him once, but can’t be sure. Didn’t give me a name. Just showed up, gave me a code key, made me memorize it and wouldn’t leave until I did.”

“We’re going to need to find him. He’ll be crucial.”

“Thought as much. Got a few ideas for that one. What else?”

“We’ll need to find some of her general operatives, too. The ones who handle her day-to-day work. Any potential operations we’ll need to shut down – we’ll need to send a note to the Earl that Carruthers was working on. And we need to find the real her, the person she left behind to become Moriarty.”

Moran whistles lowly. “Not an easy job you’re giving us.”

She closes her eyes and sinks down, forcing her shoulders to relax. “No. And it’s going to take a while.”

Much, much longer than she wanted.

******  
She’s woken by a phone ringing. Joan jolts upright, her hand flying out to check that the magazine Moran gave her is still underneath her pillow. It is. Opposite her, Moran is sitting up too, grabbing a phone off the nightstand.

Not his phone. Carruthers’ phone.

Next to him, Violet starts to stir, but Moran pets her hair and she settles. “You ready?” he asks quietly.

Joan nods.

He thumbs at the phone. “Moriarty,” he says pleasantly.

“Moran,” comes Moriarty’s voice from the speakerphone. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I thought that little Carruthers man would squeal, just like the pig he is. Tell him that the next time I see him, I’ll nail his ear to the wall.”

“No need, Moran. He isn’t anyone’s problem anymore. Now tell me: what do you think you’re doing?”

Moran glances at her, and Joan nods. They talked about this phone call. They knew it was going to come, sooner or later. “Taking advantage of your laziness to get out and see the world. Should have kept your eyes and ears on me. Did you really think I would be willing to be your pawn forever?”

Moriarty’s voice is cold, but precise. Joan closes her eyes so she can focus on it better. “I would have thought your sister’s life was precious enough that you wouldn’t want to sign her death warrant. You have, you know.”

“And yet my sister is with me, and you won’t get her.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because I have Watson.”

There is a lengthy silence, and Joan opens her eyes. Silence from Moriarty can mean a few different things, but Joan imagines she’s surprised. She knew Joan was gone, of course, but-

“So she didn’t lead you into this?”

“Little Joanie?” Moran sneers, chuckling a little. Joan thinks that Violet isn’t the only actor in their family. “She’s too terrified you’ll hurt her beloved Sherlock if she moves against you. Got a real hang up about your boy, love.”

“She’s smart,” Moriarty snaps. “She’s doing what you should have done. I will _end_ you, Moran.”

“Gonna have to find me, first. And who is to say I won’t kill your pet before you do?”

“Let me talk to her,” Moriarty says, imperious.

Moran smirks, raising an eyebrow at Joan. “Why?”

“I need to verify that my goods are unharmed, don’t I?”

Moran laughs again, and Joan realizes that he is genuinely enjoying this. As much as she hates Moriarty, Joan doesn’t think she’ll ever enjoy it when she has the upper hand. She’ll be working too hard to keep it to enjoy it. But then, Moran can rely on her. And she can rely on no one.

“Don’t think I will. Stay away, Moriarty. Or your pet dies.”

He clicks off the phone with satisfaction in his eyes. Joan stands up. “We need to go,” she says.

“Now?”

“She’ll have eyes on us soon. There are CCTVs everywhere; if she hasn’t found us already, she will in less than a minute. Get Violet up. We need to leave.”

Joan grabs her bag as Moran wakes Violet, and picks up the magazine, tossing it to him after getting his attention.

“Got an idea where we’re going?” he asks as they walk down the hall, pushing Joan ahead of him.

Joan gives him a dirty look, mindful of the potential cameras. This place is filthy and rundown enough that she wouldn’t be surprised if they’re all broken, but she can’t let herself forget about them. Not for a minute.

“Yes. But not now,” she says, rubbing a hand over her mouth to obscure her lips.

******  
She quickly nixes the idea of taking a train, and the same with a plane. They’re too enclosed, and they would be trapped. It was fine when they had surprise on their side, but that’s gone, and Joan can feel a persistent itch between her shoulder blades, the itch of being watched.

So she asks Moran how his carjacking skills are.

Crap, apparently, which is how Joan finds herself breaking into her first car in a very long time.

Moran shoves her aside, and into the backseat, a CCTV on the corner positioned directly at them. Joan gets in and Moran slams the door shut, getting into the driver’s seat, Violet gingerly getting into the passenger.

“What’s going on?” she asks quietly.

“We’re blown. Gotta leave,” he explains shortly. He may not be able to get into a car, but apparently he knows the basics of how to hotwire one, because they’re tearing off down the street seconds later.

“We’ll need to ditch this car soon,” Joan says.

“I know.”

“She’ll have snipers.”

“I know, Watson. Used to be one.”

“She can kill you with a sniper and still leave me intact.”

“I KNOW!” he shouts, and swerves around a corner. Joan holds her breath and shuts her eyes. She can’t be imagining the feeling that there is someone nipping at their heels, following them. She looks out the window, watching the CCTVs fly by them. _One for every eleven people,_ she remembers reading once. England is the mostly densely populated country in the world, when it comes to CCTVs. Moriarty would have known that when she put Violet under guard in the middle of it.

Moran drives for maybe ten minutes, tension mounting in Joan’s spine the entire time, and then he squeals into a small lot, with four other cars. “One of these,” he says.

Joan looks at the buildings around her before she gets out of the car. It’s a good spot, with poor angles for any potential sniper, the buildings looking like the mostly have just one access point. “This is a good place,” she says.

“I know,” Moran says smugly. “Moriarty isn’t the only one who knows this city. This happens to be a blind spot for CCTVs. She didn’t see us come in, and she won’t see us come out. And those buildings are shit for long distance shooting.”

Joan is briefly, wildly grateful for Moran, and points to a bland, beige car. “That one.”

“You work on getting it ready. I’m taking all the license plates so we can switch them as we go.”

Joan hurries over, Violet dogging her. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“The woman who took you and me knows that we’re gone. She has the resources to get us back if we don’t hurry,” Joan explains as best she can, hoping that it is a better explanation than the one Moran gave. She digs out her slim jim from her bag again and sets to work on her chosen car. 

“I thought this was over,” Violet says. 

Joan glances at her and then returns her attention back to the car. “You knew it wasn’t.”

She gets the car unlocked and climbs inside, getting to work on the alarm, taking a steadying breath. A few feet away, Moran gets up and starts pounding on all the cars, setting off their alarms, too. “Want to obscure which one is ours, make sure she can’t figure out a model,” he explains.

“Good,” she says, and gets the alarm off. She finishes the hotwire job and moves aside for Moran to get in the driver’s seat, taking her own place in the backseat. She lays down on the floor. “Violet, sit down on the floor, too,” she instructs. Looking confused, Violet does it anyway.

“Descriptions, love,” Moran says gently, putting his hand on Violet’s head briefly. “If asked for three people in a car, they’ll only remember seeing one.”

“Oh,” Violet says. Then, “That’s smart.”

Moran drives.

******  
Joan wakes later- hours later, her mental clock tells her- and she looks up muzzily to see that it is still dark out, and Moran is still driving. She can see Violet nestled in the passenger seat, a blanket having appeared from somewhere and been pulled over her. There are dark circles under her eyes even in sleep; Joan thinks her hell must have been far worse than either of theirs.

“Where are we going?” she asks, her voice hoarse and thin. She clears her throat. She can’t display any weakness.

“Berlin,” Moran says. “They’re one of the few cities that haven’t given themselves fully over to the hysteria of surveillance. I figure we might be able to sit still for a few hours there. Have a moment to think.”

Joan remembers the open street surveillance data that Sherlock kept, and while most of it was old, culled from late 2000s reports, she does remember reading something about Germany inexplicably having slightly less surveillance than other countries. It’s a good plan, well thought out. She isn’t entirely surprised that a man like Moran knows about mass surveillance, but she is a little surprised he thought to use it. But she shouldn’t be. Moran is a clever man, far cleverer than Moriarty ever gave him credit for.

“Good,” she says.

Moran looks at her in the rearview mirror. His face is set, but there is something softer in his eyes. “Go back to sleep, Watson,” he tells her. “We have a long journey ahead of us.”

She can’t disagree with that. “Wake me if you need me to drive,” she says, and barely hears the snort Moran gives in reply.

******  
She wakes up again when the car jerks to a halt. She gets her bearings quickly, keeping her head low in case they’ve somehow been made, and says to Moran, “We’re here?”

“We’re here,” he confirms, reaching over and shaking Violet’s shoulder. “One of the dodgiest motels in Berlin, but there’s not much surveillance around in this neighborhood. Best Moriarty could do is pinpoint that we came in here, but there’s enough potential places to give us a few hours at least.”

Joan nods and cautiously sits up, her back aching from spending hours sleeping on the floor of a car. Glancing out the window, she can see that it is a pretty run down place, but like Moran said, she can’t see any obvious cameras.

“Are we safe here?” Violet asks.

“For a while, love,” Moran says, smoothing his sister’s hair away from her face. It would almost be sweet, if Joan hadn’t seen the pictures of his crime scenes.

They gather their things and quickly check into a room under the name of Sarah Webster. The motel takes cash only, and they have bulletproof glass in front of the concierge desk. The man at the desk doesn’t ask them any questions, just hands them a key- old fashioned, no swipe cards. Joan approves of the place.

In the motel room itself there are two beds, and Joan claims the one by the window. It’s a smart use of their offensive power, she thinks- she can focus on finding them an escape route, and Moran can handle anyone who comes through the door. She can defend herself just fine, but she knows perfectly well that Moran is better built and more equipped for attacking people.

“Where do we start, then, Watson?” Moran asks once he’s back from the bathroom. He hands them both glasses of water and sits down in an ugly, stained armchair in the corner of the room. Joan sits on the bed and folds her legs under her, taking a thoughtful sip of her water.

It’s a good question. She has so many different threads, different leads and potentials, that it’s hard to determine the best place to begin. She reaches down and pulls her pack up off the floor and finds one of the lists she’s kept in the secret pocket. This is something Moran can see.

“We could probably start with some of the people that Carruthers gave us. But there are some names I want to tell you, Moran, to see if you recognize them. Moriarty had Sherlock and I take these people out of her network, and we were never able to determine why. Maybe if you know them, I can figure that out,” she says.

Across from her, Violet lays back on the bed. “I might know them, too,” she says.

“Right,” Joan agrees. “You heard a lot. So, the first one we helped arrest was Fred Merridew.”

Moran squints and shakes his head, but Violet brightens. “I met him! He helped secure the property that we were living in. You know him, Seb, I’m sure; small, mousey man, really plain face, white.”

Joan thinks Violet just described half of the white men alive, but it seems to spark recognition in Moran, who nods slowly. “Wears brown suits? Weirdly perfect teeth?” Violet nods, and he grunts. “He was there, when Moriarty moved me into that house. She gave him a briefcase and sent him away.”

“So Merridew was involved with getting property for both of you to stay in,” Joan says, and it makes sense why Moriarty would want him off the playing board. If either Sherlock or her had gotten wind of him through a fraud victim, they might have been able to track who Moriarty was setting up across the board. 

She looks at the next name. “John Vincent Harden.”

“Moriarty relied on his embezzling to bank roll some of her operations that she wanted kept off the books,” Moran says immediately. “His company paid for my surgery, after the incident at the prison.”

Joan bites her lip. “Detective Baynes?”

“Was he a fat man? Gray hair? Obviously been a police officer for a while?” Moran asks. Joan nods. “Yeah, he came by the house a few times, before you arrived. He would sometimes sit outside in his car for hours, watching it. Don’t know what he expected to see.”

“He wasn’t on Moriarty’s payroll?”

“I can’t say for sure, but I would think if he were, he’d have better things to do than eat sandwiches in his car and watch a house Moriarty controls.”

She takes a steadying breath. She knew this was a possibility, that someone innocent would get added to their hit list, and she and Sherlock had prepared for that potential. It still hurts.

But it’s another person that was linked directly to Moran’s presence in New York, and that says something, so she doesn’t let herself think on it too long.

“The Ricolettis?”

Moran looks over at Violet, looking unaccountably uncomfortable, and then sighs. “Moriarty and I had an agreement. Kind of like yours. You got books and exercise stuff; I got women. The Ricolettis were the providers of those women.”

“Seb, I thought you were done with that,” Violet says, her nose screwing up with disgust.

“As if your one nights with random celebrities are any better,” he shoots back.

Joan interrupts them before they can devolve too far away from the point at hand. “But they obviously stopped sending you working girls at some point, since Sherlock and I got them arrested. So where did those other women come from, when I was at the house with you?”

Moran shrugs. “When Moriarty stopped providing, I made my own connections. You weren’t the only one breaking Moriarty’s rules on the sly.”

It gives her some relief, to know that Chloe wasn’t affiliated with one of Moriarty’s people, or at least probably wasn’t. She moves on down her list, Moran and occasionally Violet confirming the pattern for her. Each person she and Sherlock helped arrest was somehow involved with the conspiracy of keeping Moran alive and hidden. There are only two names left on her list. She knows why Moriarty gave her Garrideb, so she asks Moran about the other one.

“Godfrey Norton?”

Moran looks at her blankly, and then looks over to Violet, who shrugs. “I’ve never heard of him,” Violet says.

“Me either,” Moran says. “What does he look like? Maybe he came by the house.”

Joan shakes her head. “I’ve never seen him myself; I didn’t catch him. Going by the picture on his website, he’s a tall, thin man with dark brown hair and a moustache.”

Moran frowns. “Doesn’t sound familiar. What did he do? He has a website?”

“He’s a lawyer.”

Moran’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Moriarty _hates_ lawyers. Has an irrational dislike of them. She won’t work with them unless they stop practicing. Never understood that myself; lawyers are easily bribed.”

“Moriarty specifically said he was a prosecutor she had often bribed.”

“Then she was lying, Watson. Maybe he was another Baynes.”

Joan doesn’t think so. She can see Moriarty removing Baynes from the board because he was getting too close. He was a detective, and he was doing his job. She understands that, she sees Moriarty’s entire thought process. But a lawyer? She’d checked, at the time, and he wasn’t actively prosecuting anyone, and the cases he had coming up all looked like relatively mundane stuff. Nothing that Joan would have linked to Moriarty.

“Norton remains a mystery, then,” she decides, and circles his name. 

Next they go through Carruthers’ phone. Moran shakes his head at every coded text Joan shows him. “Moriarty kept everything separate, remember?” he says irritably. 

“You knew the people she gave me,” she points out.

“Yeah, well, they were all part of the same operation, and that operation was me. Of course I knew them. This is Carruthers’ personal code, and I never actually worked with him directly, so I never had reason to learn it.”

Violet holds out a hand. “Can I see? I don’t know the codes or anything, but I might recognize something.”

Joan passes it over, and then digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. “You said you had some thoughts on how to find her code writer?” she asks Moran.

“Maybe. You said you were tracking Moriarty’s movements in the newspapers?”

She takes her hands out of her eyes and adjusts the pillows behind her. “I was trying. I could see some patterns that seemed like they might be her. But they also might not be.”

“Were there any places where it seemed like something was just getting started?” Moran asks. “Where something small happened that you thought was Moriarty, that could lead to something big?”

It’s a convoluted question, but Joan thinks she can see where he’s taking it. “Yes…” she says slowly, thinking of some of the things she read in the Chinese newspapers Moran gave her. “How’s your Tagalog?”

“Good, but if you’re thinking the Philippines, English should be fine, unless we’re going into the rural areas,” he says. 

“Then we should be okay. There were some bank robberies in Manila, in the Metro areas. They had the same style as some other bank robberies in Shanghai and Seoul, in terms of method, and we know that Moriarty started working in those countries recently.”

Moran nods. “When she’s looking to start up some place, she tends to arrange bank robberies. Quick influx of cash, gives her a microcosmic idea of security in the area, brings a number of authority figures on the scene so she can determine who to bribe… if you think it matches some of her other jobs, that would be the place to start.”

“What are you thinking, Seb?” Violet asks, handing Carruther’s phone back to Joan with a shake of her head.

“Whenever Moriarty starts new operatives, she sends her code writer to them to give them their own code. I would recognize him, I think. It’s not much of a plan…”

“But it’s a start,” Joan says. “Fine. How do we get to Manila?”

******  
The safest answer ends up being to take a cargo ship into Pakistan, then to alternate driving and taking trains through China, and finally take a cargo ship from Hong Kong into the Port of Manila.

Joan has been on two road trips in her life. Neither were good. This one, though, is intolerable.

It’s intolerable because of the company. Violet lashes out at Moran, angry about the fact that even though she’s free, she isn’t really free. 

“I understand why I can’t go back to my life yet, I do,” Violet vents at her in their shared sleeper compartment on one of the trains. “But I can’t help be angry about it. If it weren’t for Seb, I wouldn’t even be here, you know?”

Joan smiles and reassures her, and ignores the angry twist in her gut.

Moran is impatient and becomes moody and morose. He snaps at everyone, even Violet, though he at least apologizes to her. Joan and Moran usually get into one argument a day, though Joan tries to keep her temper. Sometimes she fails. She’s tired and frustrated, too. 

Whenever she can, she studies the codes on Carruthers’ phone, working to break them apart. She’s making progress, she thinks.

There are good moments. She and Moran play cards throughout the journey, Violet occasionally joining in and proving she’s a more flagrant cheat than her brother. “Where do you think he learned it?” she laughs, collecting her winnings.

She and Violet end up sharing rooms most of the time they stop to get them. It’s nice to have another person there, someone who isn’t Moran. They talk a lot about their childhoods, swapping big brother stories and eye rolls. Joan innocently asks Moran over takeout one night, “Whatever happened to Mr. Waddles?” and laughs hard when he turns bright red.

When they’re driving along in largely rural areas, with lots of open space, Moran will stop the car and take time to teach Joan how to use different weapons that he picks up along the way, discarding each one as they go so that Moriarty can’t follow their trail. 

“They’re only teaching tools anyway,” Moran says when Joan asks him about it, worried about the money spent to get each gun, each knife, each quarterstaff (and that one was a surprise). “When we get to Manila, I’ll arrange for better ones.” 

But mostly it’s a long, boring trip, full of constant vigilance and paranoia, and it leaves them exhausted. 

It also takes them a month, which makes Joan and Moran cringe, though they agree it’s for the best. Violet is not so understanding.

“Why couldn’t we have just flown?” she asks grumpily as they finally make it into Hong Kong.

“Flights are more easily monitored and surveilled than cargo ships, trains, and stolen vehicles,” Moran says robotically, leading them through the busy city to their next port.

“Fine,” she says. “Next time we stay in Europe.”

It’s not a bad plan.

******  
Metro Manila, like all urban centers around the world, has cameras everywhere, if not to the degree that most cities in Europe do. Joan, Moran, and Violet are smuggled into yet another low quality motel by a truck driver who handily accepts their bribe. Joan is thankful for the months of yoga she did as she contorts herself into a large crate to be carried into the kitchen.

Some more bribe money is passed around, and they get a hotel room completely off the record.

“All right, now that we’re here, we need to perfect the plan,” Joan says.

“I’m taking a shower,” Violet says, and leaves Moran and Joan.

“All right,” Moran says, pulling out a map from his bag. He unfolds it, and they huddle around it. “There are two airports in Metro Manila: Clark International, and Ninoy Aquino International. I’m going to hang around them, see if I spot anyone I recognize. It might be our code writer, it might be another of Moriarty’s agents, but in either case, it’ll be someone we can use.”

“There are two airports, Moran,” Joan points out.

“Yeah. My sister can watch whatever one I’m not watching. It won’t be all day, either; Moriarty always flies in her people between midnight and four in the morning. Fewer people around that way.”

“It can’t be your sister,” she says immediately, thoughts flying ahead. “Violet doesn’t have the training.”

“Nothing official, yeah, but she’s still a Moran, Watson, no matter what she changed her name to. We Morans grew up rough, and we learned from it.”

“No,” Joan says. “Even if you give her the best description in the world, she could miss something. And even if you gave me a bad description, I might see something others would miss. I had official training. Not like yours, not from a government. But I learned from the _best_ , Moran. It has to be me.”

Moran scowls at her and turns away, rubbing his right hand along his scars. He does that when he’s agitated but knows she’s right. Joan’s had a lot of time to learn that gesture.

“You can’t be seen, Watson,” he says, turning around. “There’ll be more cameras in the airports than anywhere else in this damned city. Moriarty sees even a glimpse of you off your leash, she’ll know that you aren’t really my prisoner and then she’ll kill your boy.”

He’s right. She knows he’s right, because she thinks about it every day, every moment of every day, that one step wrong could lead to so many deaths of so many people she loves. But she’s known for weeks now, since stepping off the ship in Pakistan, that she needs to be able to operate independently of Moran. Violet may have a certain set of skills, but she doesn’t have Joan’s, and they’re going to need hers too.

“I know,” she says. “We’re going to have to make it hard for her. Can you get me some things?”

Joan hands Moran a list, one that she put together while in the cargo hold from Hong Kong. Moran studies it, pursing his lips.

“You really think this’ll work?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says firmly.

“All right,” Moran says. “I can get you these things. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

******  
The bag hits her in the chest. Joan grunts and glares at Moran, who grins at her.

“There you are. Everything you asked for.” He turns to Violet, who is already opening her mouth. “And yes, I brought take out too. Hope you like lechon.”

Joan ignores the proffered food and start to dig through the bag. She pulls out three hoodies, all with different patterns and colors on them, and handfuls of makeup. She finds the items she needs the most at the very bottom of the bag. “Hey Violet,” she says. Violet looks up from her food. “Want to help me dye my hair?”

******  
They end up cutting it, too. Once her hair is cut, Joan takes a deep breath and hands her the dye and the bleach. Her hair is so dark the bleach is probably necessary, and Violet agrees.

“I used to be a hair dresser, to make ends meet between acting gigs,” she explains, and Moran snorts.

“Terrible hair dresser. Ever wondered why I’m bald, Watson?”

Joan rolls her eyes, ignoring the friendly bickering between Moran and Violet, and focuses on the fact that it won’t be a drastic change. Brown, not black. Not enough to stand out, but not enough like her to risk recognition.

At least, that’s what she tells herself.

Moran makes faces and loud comments about the entire dyeing process, which Joan ignores and Violet pithily counters, mostly by reminding him that all of his working girls probably had dyed hair, so he should respect the process.

“There!” Violet says, once they’re all done and she’s brushed out Joan’s hair. “Go take a look.”

She walks into the bathroom, bracing herself, and looks into the mirror.

Her black hair is now a plain, muddy brown. And the hair that she hasn’t cut other than for trims in close to ten years is gone. It’s in an asymmetrical bob that covers one eye completely, and while it looks nice, and Violet did a good job, it doesn’t look like _her_.

Joan closes the door to the bathroom door and sits down on the toilet, willing herself not to cry at everything she’s given up. 

It only takes twenty minutes for the urge to pass.

******  
Moran wakes her in the middle of the night. “Ready for our first shift, Watson?”

She rubs the sleep out of her eyes and nods. “Yeah. I need some time to get ready.”

“Twenty minutes,” he warns.

When Joan was first apprenticing, she’d done a unit (as if it had been so structured as that) on facial recognition software and, specifically how to beat it. She changed herself as much as she could for people watching surveillance footage the night before; now she needs to do something to prevent machines from catching her. Which means using makeup to contour the hell out of her face.

Joan is no stranger to makeup, but she generally leans toward a more natural look, so using makeup to alter the rise and length of her cheekbones, the shape of her eyes, the width of her nose, is all very new to her. She’d done her research, though, both in what facial recognition software experts found was most likely to beat the machines while still appearing normal, and in terms of watching Youtube makeup tutorials. She’s done in fifteen minutes, pulling on a hoodie and putting up the hood so she can better mask her head shape. Moran looks at her and makes a face, seemingly disturbed by her new face.

They wake Violet and give her instructions to keep an eye out, arrange a site to meet in case something goes wrong, and head out to catch their cabs

“I’m giving you Clark,” he tells her in the elevator.

Joan nods. It makes sense. It’s the smaller of the two, and Moran actually knows what the code writer looks like. “Tall, black hair, a large, Roman nose that has been broken at least twice, a red complexion,” she recites back.

Moran nods as they get off on the ground floor. “Good luck, Watson,” he says, and gets into the first cab. Joan waves to him, and waits for her cab to arrive.

******  
They watch for nine nights before they finally catch a break.

Joan is standing at the baggage claim, looking impatiently at the bags like she’s looking for her own, when she’s really looking at all the people around her. It’s three in the morning, and she’s tired of this entire routine. It’s good practice for her ability to look at people and read them, but it’s exhausting, and she’s convinced that she missed the code writer, that he managed to get by her.

Also, the constant makeup use is taking its toll on her skin.

Her cell phone rings. It’s a burner, just for their work in Manila. They’ll get new ones when they move on. She grabs it out of her pocket and thumbs it on. “Yeah,” she says.

“I got him,” Moran voice says in her ear, strangely intimate. 

“Okay, sure, I’ll meet you out front. Just gotta get my bag,” she replies, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening.

“I’m following him now. He rented a car and is heading north of Metro Manila. We’re on R-1. Get a car and get on R-8. I’ll call you again once I find out where he’s going. Tell Vi,” he says, and disconnects. 

“Okay, thanks!” she says cheerfully. She reaches down and grabs the one bag that’s been on the carousel for three turns around, and takes it with her as she heads for the exit. Outside, she drops it carefully on a trolley full of other luggage, and then keys in the number for Violet.

“Get a cab and head north on R-1,” she says when Violet answers. 

“Got it. Any destination?”

“Tell the driver you’ll let him know the destination later,” Joan says, and hangs up.

******  
She takes a car from in front of an apartment that looks like they can afford it, and drives. She drives for about forty minutes when her phone rings again. She answers it before the first ring finishes.

“Where am I going?”

“Fisherman’s Budget Hotel,” Moran says with a sound of distaste.

“On my way.”

Clark International is almost two hours from Metro Manila. She should be there in about an hour.

******  
When she gets out of the car, she spots Violet and Moran immediately, parked in their own car a ways down the street. Joan walks casually down, opens the backseat, and gets in.

“So?”

Moran passes her a breakfast burrito, which she eats gratefully. She’s starving. “He hasn’t left yet. Do we want to do this in his hotel room, or do we want to follow him to wherever he’s going?” he asks.

Joan chews on her lip, thinking. If they go after him in his hotel room, they’ll be at a disadvantage. He works for Moriarty, so he’s likely armed, or trained in hand to hand combat, or _something_. Everyone Moriarty hires is dangerous somehow. Going after him in his hotel room means he’ll have things easily on hand, and he’ll know exactly where they are.

But they don’t know where he’s going, either, and that has just as many disadvantages. More, maybe, depending on who he’s going to meet.

“You said he rented his own car?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Moran says, and snorts. “Posh bastard. I was always told to just take a cab.”

“Neither, then,” she says. She pulls out a pair of binoculars from the go bag that Violet brought with her. “We take him en route.”

******  
It isn’t hard. 

Metro Manila has some of the worst traffic in the world. It’s simplicity itself to walk up to the car while it’s stuck in a jam, open the doors, and get in.

They do just that. Moran opens the door and gets in right behind the code writer, pressing a Browning against his head. “Just keep driving,” Moran says, smiling, and lowers the gun, shoving it into the back of the code writer’s seat. “Yell, and you die.”

Joan isn’t armed. If something happens, and the code writer gets back to Moriarty, he can’t think her anything other than an unwilling hostage.

The code writer is made of strong stuff, because he only raises an eyebrow and says, “Do I know you?”

“Moriarty didn’t mention me, I take it?”

“Moriarty doesn’t mention a lot of things,” the man says. His accent is Chicagoan, Joan thinks. 

“Keeps you in the dark, too, then?”

“I know what I need to know. I remember you, though. You work for Moriarty. One of her assassins, aren’t you?” the man asks, and calmly changes lanes. Joan has to admire his cool.

“I was,” Moran says. “You wrote me a new code recently, though we didn’t meet that time. I was also one of her captives.”

The man’s other eyebrow slowly creeps up. “You’re Moran.”

“I am.”

His eyes swivel to meet Joan’s in the rearview mirror. “Then you must be Joan Watson. A pleasure to meet one of the few people in the world who cracked a cipher of mine. Shame it isn’t under better circumstances.”

She allows herself to nod at him, and Moran elbows her sharply. She shrinks back, playing her part, and watches with interest as the man scowls suddenly before returning to his neutral expression. He either doesn’t like apparently broken women, or he doesn’t like men who mistreat them.

She could use that.

“You know our names, then, mate,” Moran continues. “How about you tell us yours?”

The man sighs. “Abe Slaney.”

“Slaney. A pleasure to finally meet you. On equal footing.”

“As it were,” Slaney says dryly. “Are you going to kill me?”

“It’s not my current plan, but we’ll see how it goes. I am more interested in your codes, at the moment. And who they go to.”

“Assassins, spies, thieves, grifters, hackers… different sorts for different sorts,” Slaney says. His gaze hardens as he changes lanes again. “And that’s all you’ll get from me. We all heard what you did to two of Moriarty’s kidnappers. One of them may have broken, but he was weak. I have worked with Moriarty since the beginning. I won’t be so easy.”

Moran’s smile is shark-like. “Good. I like a challenge. Get off at the next exit.”

They don’t speak again during the drive.

******  
They tie Slaney to a chair in an empty apartment that Violet secured for them while they were waiting for him to arrive in the city. He looks bored throughout the entire thing, and continues to look bored while Moran asks him questions punctuated with punches. 

Joan sits in the corner and watches, a plan forming in her mind.

“Moran,” she says, rising from her chair when he next raises his fist. Moran turns and looks at her, raising his eyebrows in question once his back is turned fully from Slaney. He keeps the tension in his shoulders, the anger in his hands. She widens her eyes slightly, encouraging him to continue at her. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re hungry,” he says flatly. And then he storms toward her, raising his hand high and slapping her across the face, so hard that she collapses to the ground. She moves with the blow, exactly as she was once taught, and watches for Slaney’s reaction.

Slaney hasn’t flinched once during his interrogation. But now, he flinches. 

Joan senses a new plan, and covers her cheek with her hand, making sure one finger is against her nose. “Please,” she says.

Moran squints at her, but really at her hand position. He nods jerkily. “Fine,” he says. He walks back to Slaney and shoves a fist in his face. “We’ll continue this conversation when I get back.”

Joan stays on the ground even after Moran leaves. She knows how to play this, she thinks. She knows that she can’t make the first move.

“Hey,” Slaney says after a few minutes. “You okay?”

Joan nods, wiping at her eyes (which are completely dry, but Slaney can’t see that from where he’s sitting). “I’m fine,” she says. She looks over at him. “You’ll get used to it, after a while,” she says in the emptiest tone she has.

“Men that hit women… they shouldn’t be allowed to walk this earth,” Slaney says.

Joan wipes at her eyes again, and then stands up, pulling her chair over to where Slaney is. She sits down and offers him a small smile. “Well, I’m not exactly going to disagree with that.”

Slaney laughs. It’s an ugly laugh, but Joan lets herself laugh a little with him. She stops when he stops, and then watches him quietly.

“You solved my cipher,” Slaney says.

Joan lifts one shoulder and lets it fall. “That was a long time ago.”

“You solved it, though. There aren’t many people in the world who’ve done that. Moriarty has done it. Two others have. You’re the first one I hadn’t worked with before.”

Joan doesn’t tell him that she wasn’t actually the one who cracked it. But she’ll take the credit for it, because Slaney is talking to her more than he has with Moran in the past two hours. “I like ciphers,” she says simply.

That actually is true. Joan loved studying ciphers. It was one of her favorite units. If she can convince Slaney to tell her anything at all about his work, she might be able to work backwards and crack his other ones.

“It’s one thing to like ciphers,” Slaney says, smiling at her, his eyes wrinkling in the corners, “but it’s another thing entirely to solve a doubly encrypted cipher. I could see you determining that I use straddled checkerboard ciphers, but to then go the step further? Joan, that’s remarkable.”

Joan ducks her head, genuinely smiling. “We all have our hobbies.”

“You’re wasted in Moran’s company,” Slaney says. “Free me. Free me, and we can work on ciphers together.”

He thinks he’s working her over, she realizes. He thinks he’s doing to her exactly what she’s doing to him. It would be funny, in a different situation. Instead it’s just sad.

“I can’t,” she says quietly. “He’ll kill me.”

“I can protect you.”

“You can’t. I’ve seen what happens to people who try.”

They sit quietly again, Joan studying her eyes and watching him through the fringe of her hair. His hands are flexing repeatedly on the armrests of his chair. He’s clenching his teeth. As cool as he acts, he’s scared, she determines. He’s scared, and he thinks she’s his only hope.

“Why do you do it?” she asks. “Why do you help Moriarty?”

“For the challenge,” he says immediately. It’s a lie. He’s looking in the wrong direction, and he’s too tense. 

“For the money,” she says.

“No.”

“It can’t be that much of a challenge to create the same code repeatedly for Moriarty’s operatives, most of whom are probably Neanderthals who need a basic substitution cipher.”

That reaches him. “The same code?” he snaps. “Do you understand the work that goes into making sure that all of Moriarty’s top operatives have their own unique code, unique and nearly unbreakable? I’ve had to give up on crafting them, her operation is so large. I run a _block cipher_ now, Joan. I take the results and run them through another cipher, sure, but the art is _gone_ because of the demand. I’ve _commercialized_ myself because the challenge was so large.”

“So you made it easier on yourself. So you could get the money.” Slaney opens his mouth to argue, but hesitates. Joan smiles. “You see? You do it for the money.”

He’s silent for a while, and then shakes his head. “It used to be about the art.”

“It always becomes about the money, in the end.” She pauses, and then loops back. “That’s why Moran is keeping me, after all. He thinks eventually Moriarty will pay him enough money to get me back. He doesn’t care at all about Moriarty. He just wants enough money to set himself up in the world.”

Slaney raises his eyebrows. “He doesn’t care about revenge?”

Joan rolls her eyes. “He doesn’t have the principles to believe in revenge.”

“He has the ego. I remember Moran.”

“All he wants is money. He has the ego for that.”

At that moment, Moran comes back in. Joan scrambles away from Slaney, but not quick enough. Moran grabs her around her neck and drags her back to the corner he’d designed hers, throwing her to the ground and then throwing her chair after her. “Stay away from him, Watson,” he snarls.

She runs her hand through her hair three times, nodding and looking at the ground.

An hour later, Moran wraps up with Slaney and drags Joan out of the hotel room. He lets go of her once they’re in the elevator. 

“Well?”

“I have a pretty good idea of how to crack the ciphers, but I’ll need Slaney’s computers to do it. He doesn’t do everything purely by hand anymore, he runs a symmetric-key algorithm initially on the message, and I’ll need to see what he’s running.”

“Vi broke into his hotel and made copies of everything. Cloned his hard drive and all.”

Joan blinks. “Violet?”

Moran chuckles. “Violet may be everything my parents ever wanted, but she was a thug growing up. You know why I can’t jack a car? Because Vi did that, while I did the hot wiring.”

“Go figure. Well, if she has that, we’re set. The knife is in place?”

“He’ll find it in a few hours. You set him up?”

“He thinks you just want a ton of money, and then you’ll give me up. He’ll tell Moriarty. He likes me, and if he thinks Moriarty can get me back...”

“He wants you,” Moran says flatly. “There’s a difference.” The elevator door pings open, and he resumes his grip on her arm, tugging her along. 

Joan frowns. “He doesn’t like it when you hit me or threaten me, and he’s intrigued that I cracked his code. Not all men think like you.”

Moran’s scowl is fierce as he turns to face her. “Abe Slaney is a rapist, and all he thinks about is how to get a woman where he wants her. Trust me, Watson. He isn’t reporting to Moriarty out of a strange, twisted chivalry. It’s because he wants you for himself.”

He continues walking, and Joan follows, thinking about everything she saw, everything she deduced. She can’t come to quite to the same conclusion based on the evidence, but she isn’t willing to disregard Moran’s opinion entirely, especially since nothing she saw blatantly contradicted it.

“How do you know he’s a rapist?” she asks as Moran hails a cab.

Moran makes a growling sound as a cab speeds by them, not even slowing down. “Moriarty mentioned having a rapist on her payroll, in a different sort of role, one that used his brains rather than his cock. It could be someone else, but it might be him. I guessed.”

Joan could say something about how abhorrent guessing it, but she bites her tongue. Those were never her words anyway.

******  
Violet hands her a laptop when Joan walks back into their hotel room. “I think this should help,” she says.

Joan nods. “Probably, and we need to talk about all these skills you apparently have at some point, but right now we need to leave.”

Violet’s face crumbles, but Joan ignores it in favour of throwing her new makeup into her go bag. She understands the disappointment. They’ve never stayed in one place long enough to catch their breath, until now. But they purposely left Slaney the tools to manage his escape, which means he will be reporting their location to Moriarty within a few hours. They need to make sure they’re nowhere near Manila when Moriarty gets that phone call.

“Do you think-” she begins to ask, and Moran nods.

“A plane, yeah. It’s a risk we’ll have to take.”

Violet sighs and she sees her, out of the corner of her eye, start to pack up her own things. “Better than a cargo ship, at least,” she says. “Thanks for that.”

Joan offers her a smile, wishing she had more to give her, but there’s nothing. Maybe they’ll get a nicer hotel next time around to try and make it up to her.

“Where to next?” Moran asks.

Joan considers as she pulls on a new hoodie, lifting the hood over her head automatically. “We need someplace where I can sit with Slaney’s materials for a few days without interruption. A place where we’ll be relatively safe. Just for a few days.”

Moran tosses his bag over his shoulder and grabs Violet’s for her, heading out the door. Joan follows him, making sure she’s between Moran and Violet. They are certain there are no cameras in this hotel, but when Moriarty inevitably checks the security footage from nearby, Joan wants to make sure that she still looks like a prisoner, and that Violet looks like an extension of Moran. It’s safer for her that way.

“That’s a tough one,” Moran admits.

“How about Marseilles?” Violet says suddenly. Joan frowns. France, from what she recalls, has a lot more CCTVs, and Moriarty has a number of major operations out of there, from what Joan can tell. She inhales, ready to object, when Moran laughs.

“Oh, that’s good, Vi. Marseilles it is.”

She shuts her mouth. Moran is just as safety conscious as Joan, and if he really believes they’ll be safe there… if she keeps insisting that Moran trust her, she supposes that she needs to give him a little bit of trust in return.

******  
They don’t take one plane straight to Marseilles. They hop around, mixing major airlines with tiny private planes, and eventually Moran arranges to have them smuggled into Marseilles via a fishing boat from Corsica.

“Why Marseilles?” she asks Moran, helping their smugglers load the boat. She wrinkles her nose. Everything she owns is going to smell like fish. She enjoys sushi, but this is a little overpowering.

“Family,” Moran says, and grins over at Violet, who beams back at him. “See, my mum and dad, they kept Vi and I out of the family business, but the Morans have always been a crime family. There’s a few different branches- a branch that still operates out of Ireland, a branch in Australia of all places, but then there’s also a branch in Marseilles.”

Joan raises an eyebrow and accepts a fisherman’s help into the rocking boat. She crawls into the hidden compartment, pressing herself next to Violet, who is already squeezed in. “Really, Marseilles? Ireland is obvious, and I could see where Australia comes in, but _Marseilles_?”

Violet wiggles next to her, getting settled. “During the interwar years, a lot of criminal networks ended up in Marseilles, mostly ones that were running drugs. One entire branch of our family ended up there,” she says, and she sounds proud, like having criminals for family is a good thing. Joan is beginning to wonder if talented acting isn’t the only thing the Moran twins share.

“Not even the bombing during World War II could dig us out. The Moran family has been here for decades,” Moran says, and gets in the boat. It rocks erratically, and Joan holds her breath until it calms.

“You don’t think Moriarty will think to check with your family?” Joan asks, dubious.

His look is dark. “Family is family. Wouldn’t matter if she threatened them, hurt them, or killed them. They won’t give us up. It’s a matter of honor.”

It’s a tight fit with Moran, but the fishermen drop the floor over them, and it manages to latch into place. It’s dark, and it’s hot, and Joan, who has never been claustrophobic before, feels a small part of her descend into gibbering panic. But she also knows this is probably the best way to get them into Marseilles undetected. So she closes her eyes tight, remembers everything she can from yoga about how to breathe, and focuses on that instead of the terror tight in her chest.

******  
Joan doesn’t see the negotiations between Moran and his family. He tells her and Violet to stay in the boat, in case they refuse to take them in. When Moran comes back, though, he looks pleased, and a car pulls up as soon as they’ve gathered their bags.

“Violet, you remember Great Aunt Aileen,” Moran says as he tosses the bags into the backseat. He nods at the woman driving the car, a small, wiry white woman with gray hair piled into complicated looking plaits on the top of her head and a cigarette resting comfortably in the corner of her mouth.

“Of course,” Violet says, and gets into the front seat with a grin. “You always made the best biscuits.”

Aileen grins back. “Course I did,” she says, her accent a strange mixture of French and Irish. “And you were Viola, then.”

“All actors have stage names,” she says blithely, as if she hadn’t been trying to distance herself from her family, her history. Joan narrowly resists rolling her eyes.

“Auntie, this is Joan Watson. She’s the one helping Vi and me out of this jam we’re in,” Moran says. He gets into the backseat, and Joan gets in with him, moving the bags so they’re wedged between them, and then extends a hand between the seats to Aileen.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Moran,” she says.

Aileen takes her hand. “You can call me Aileen. Sebastian says you need somewhere isolated to stay. Any other needs?”

“I’ll need a dependable Internet connection,” she says. “And electricity, of course. Other than that, it could be a shack by the sea for all I care.”

Aileen takes out her cigarette and blows a cloud of smoke out the window. “Well, that’s a good thing, too, because I know just the place for you.”

******  
It really is a shack by the sea.

But as requested, it has Internet and electricity, even if the running water isn’t always reliable, as Aileen tells them. Joan doesn’t care. She sets up at the old, knotted table in the middle of a room that seems to serve as living room, kitchen, and dining room all at once, and plugs in the laptop.

Their plan for Slaney was carefully plotted and highly calculated. They spent weeks on it, while traveling to Manila, talking through a myriad of variations. But they settled on this one, the one that would get them access to Slaney’s ciphers and leave him none the wiser.

It wouldn’t do them much good, after all, to learn his ciphers only to have him change them all.

Joan is hoping the second part of their plan will also work, and Moriarty will offer Moran money. She’s made indirect contact with a member of Everyone, who opened a back door to some bank accounts for them, but that won’t last forever. Eventually one of those billionaires with Cayman Island accounts will notice that a few thousand is missing, and Joan can’t use Everyone again. They need more money.

It’s risky- so risky, risky enough that Joan’s started having nightmares again, endless nightmares where everything is dark and she’s stuck and drowning in a black mud too thick to swim through. She wakes up convinced that she can’t breathe. But it is a risk with a high payoff, one that could save them months of effort.

If she can crack the ciphers.

“I’ll be in charge of getting you food. Leave me a list in the mailbox, and I’ll bring whatever you need by once a day. My grandbabies will be watching the house at night, so you don’t need to worry about keeping watch. During the day, though, you’ll be on your own. We have our own jobs to deal with, and we can’t let everything fall to shit because of family obligations,” Aileen says, moving around the small space with authority and setting a kettle on to boil. Joan looks at it and suddenly desperately wants longjing tea. It’s an odd craving; she doesn’t drink it much normally.

Her mother drinks longjing tea. There is something about Aileen that reminds Joan of her mother, and she thinks that must be why she suddenly craves it.

She ignores it. She’ll take whatever tea they give her and be glad of it.

Joan focuses instead on setting up the laptop and getting her workstation ready, pulling out a few blank pages from her bag and leaving them out so they’ll dry. The crossing wasn’t easy, and everything they own is soaked through, with the exception of their phones and the laptop. The fishermen put those in special bags and secured them in a different area of the boat. Violet sits down on a lopsided stool next to Joan and hands her a phone.

“Seb slipped me Slaney’s phone, and I cloned that too,” she says. “I figured it might come in handy.”

Joan takes it, grateful for her quick thinking, and nods. “If I were Slaney, I’d probably wouldn’t use just my computer for my ciphers. He probably uses his phone some, too. Plus, it’ll have his contacts. Thanks, Violet.”

Violet smirks. “I’m not completely useless, once I stop complaining.”

She agrees, but she knows better than to say it.

“What will you lot be wanting for supper, then?” Aileen asks, taking the kettle off the stove when it starts to whistle. She pours water into a cast iron teapot, and then looks at them expectantly.

“What do you mean, Auntie?” asks Moran. He opens the fridge. “It looks like there’s some food here for sandwiches. We can take care of it.”

Aileen snorts. “My own family, finally come to visit after nearly twenty years away? What kind of aunt would I be if I made them prepare their own dinner, their first night in?”

Joan lets the family bickering wash over her, and focuses on the screen in front of her. The desktop screen is strangely blank, the only icons being for the recycling bin and a shortcut to the Internet. She thinks for a moment, and then pulls up a command prompt, typing in a series of commands that one of their pet hackers taught her.

It works. The computer whirs, the screen blinks, and a new desktop comes up, this one full of folders.

She smiles.

******  
At some point, food appears at her elbow. Moran says, in a low voice, “I hope you like pieds paquets and crubeens.”

Joan looks at the food. “Those are feet,” she says flatly.

“Lamb and pig, if you need to know, but it’s Aunt Aileen’s two favorite dishes in the world, and she’ll be mortally offended if you don’t eat it. Buck up, Watson,” Moran says, and flashes her a ghoulish smile. “At least you don’t have to cook.”

******  
Time blurs for Joan. Food appears and is taken away, people give her tea and glasses of water. At some point she’s fairly sure she registers the light changing around her, but she doesn’t lose focus on the computer in front of her.

If they can break Slaney’s ciphers, if they can get all of them, it will speed up the time Joan thinks it will take to bring down her entire network. Slaney said to her that he had different types of ciphers for different types of criminals. If they can figure out who does what, they can determine who is the most important to take out, who needs to go in order to weaken the structure of Moriarty’s empire.

Joan doesn’t let herself think about what they’ll need to do in order to remove people from the network. She just focuses on the pages and pages of ciphers in front of her.

She focuses on one cipher at a time. She starts with just trying to decrypt the names of people Slaney wrote ciphers for. It’s a huge document, symbols and letter and numbers covering the pages. But Joan thinks this one is probably a unique cipher, one that is only used one time just for this purpose. Everything else she’s found on the computer would require knowing who a person is and what they do. So she begins with names.

Slaney lamented the depreciation of his art, in his need to rapidly produce a number of individual ciphers, she remembers. He called it commercialization, and he said it with such a genuine tone of disgust that Joan doesn’t doubt the veracity of it. Which means, she decides, on his personal computer, he probably would use a classic cipher rather than a modern one. It shortens the list of possible ciphers, though not by much.

She finds the key completely by accident. Taking a break from staring at the page, Joan starts flipping through the rest of Slaney’s files and finds, inexplicably, an ebook of Machiavelli’s _The Prince_. There are no other books on the laptop. There are several on his cell phone, she discovers when she checks, but they all tend to be popular novels and genre fiction. Machiavelli is an outlier, and Joan knows better than to consider it a coincidence.

It takes her a few hours more to determine the cipher, a running key cipher, and a few more to decrypt the document, but she finally gets there, her head aching and her fingers numb from writing it all out by hand.

Joan stares at the paper. There are close to 150 names there, if she had to guess. Certainly not enough to qualify as her entire network, but enough, she’s sure, to be Moriarty’s most trusted lieutenants around the world.

“You solved it.”

Joan starts, and turns. Aileen is standing behind her, a mug of tea in her hand.

“I thought you didn’t come by during the day,” Joan says, too tired and surprised to stop herself.

“Normally, I wouldn’t,” Aileen agrees, and sits down on the stool. Joan looks around for Moran or Violet, but neither seems to be in the room. She doesn’t know if she’s seen them in days, now that she thinks about it. “But I was interested in your project. I wanted to see how long it would take.”

“You know something about cryptography?” she asks. 

To her surprise, Aileen shakes her head. “Oh, no. In my day, we didn’t bother with that nonsense. Say what you mean and be done with it. But my grandbabies use it sometimes, and it gives them a headache. Glad I passed the family business along to the younger ones. I don’t need those headaches anymore.”

Despite herself, Joan smiles. “Somehow, I don’t think you fully gave up the business.”

Aileen’s smile is wicked, and she leans over conspiratorially. “Don’t tell the grandbabies,” she whispers, “but I always double check their work. You don’t live to be a ninety-two year old criminal without something in the attic.”

Joan blinks quickly. “You’re _ninety-two_?”

“Almost ninety-three. Still got a bit of juice in me yet,” she says cheerfully. Aileen hands her her mug of tea as she scoots the stool over, looking at the list of names by Joan’s wrist. “That’s a lot of names there.”

“Yeah,” Joan sighs. “Now I just need to figure out who they all are, what they do, and what cipher they’re assigned so that I can work on decrypting their communiques.”

“Quite a task ahead of you,” Aileen says, nodding. She stabs her finger onto the page, pointing at a name a little more than halfway down. “That one, Tomas Mathieu. He’s local. Gun runner.”

“Oh,” Joan says, and dutifully writes it down. She just finishes when Aileen points at another name.

“Callisto Allbrook is a forger. I don’t know her personally, but some of my people have spoken about her before. And Allenby, he’s a money launderer.”

Aileen keeps pointing to names and telling her what they do. Occasionally she knows where exactly they work, which country they’re in. Very, very occasionally, she knows what they’re working on. In the end, Aileen gives Joan twenty-two occupations, eight precise countries, and four known projects. Then she smiles, pats Joan on the hand, and wanders away, yelling for Moran to walk with her outside. 

Joan fervently hopes she’s even a little bit like Aileen Moran when she’s older.

(Well. Maybe without the crime.)

******  
That night, Aileen comes to their shack by the sea again, this time with what seems like her entire family. 

Joan is going through Slaney’s computer again, trying to get a grasp on the different types of ciphers, when the door bangs open and a handsome man with dark skin and dark eyes walks in, carrying an armful of bags.

She’s halfway out of her chair, reaching for the nearest weapon (the wobbling stool) when three more people walk in, two more men and a woman wearing a head scarf, their complexions varying from darker, like the first man’s skin, to a light brown with yellow undertones. Behind them comes Aileen, and then another ten or fifteen people, a mix of men and women, a wide range of ages.

“We’re celebrating,” Aileen says, and points the first man to the stove. “There, Farouk, put it there.”

Joan must look alarmed- she certainly feels it- because Aileen comes over and pats her. “I don’t believe you had the chance to meet my grandbabies, Joan. That there’s the oldest, my Farouk, and his wife Yasmine is just behind him. Then there’s Sean and Iain, and Leila and Asma and Amina- Asma and Amina are twins, just like my Seb and Viola- and Mohammad and Nassim and Moira and Maeve and Rian and Yousra, and- oh, you’ll meet them all, wipe that gobsmacked look off your face.”

She sits back down, and Moran and Violet come out from the bedrooms, Violet beaming with pleasure while Moran looks… not displeased. “I see you invited the entire family over,” he says, glaring at Aileen. It’s not at all like his regular glare. If Joan had to describe it, she’d say it was almost… playful.

“Well, you obviously weren’t going to get around to it,” Aileen snaps back. She points at Violet. “Get me a chair, Viola. Your great-aunt is old.”

The family history gets told in dribs and drabs as Farouk cooks the dinner- no crubeens this time, Joan notes with amusement. Apparently even the matriarch can’t stand up against rules about halal. The Moran family moved over in the interwar years, young Aileen fell in love with young Karim, and then Aileen killed anyone who objected to their marriage, eventually taking over the family business.

“I couldn’t be having with that nonsense,” Aileen yells over the roar of her grandchildren’s laughter. “Karim was a good man, and a good business partner.”

Joan sits apart from the all, her skin crawling. It’s a loud, joyous family, and there’s so much love that it’s almost blinding. But Sean and Asma are arguing over the best drug smuggling routes, and Yasmine and Yousra are pulling knives out of their jeans and discussing who they stabbed or killed or maimed with them.

These aren’t her people. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, as stuck as she is with Moran, but these aren’t her people. They’re the people she would normally be putting in jail, and with good reason. Even Aileen, with her deep wrinkles and stooped back.

She excuses herself and ducks into the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed and letting herself have a minute on her own.

The door closes, and Joan opens her eyes. Violet is leaning against the door, smiling ruefully. “That’s not really my scene,” she says.

“I would have thought you loved parties,” she replies, licking her lips. “What with the acting.”

Violet shakes her head and moves over to sit next to Joan, the bed dipping slightly under her weight. “I do love parties. I love dressing up in beautiful dresses and showing off to the world that being 48 doesn’t mean you’re dead, or a sexless lump. I meant that the criminal element isn’t my scene.”

“Oh,” Joan says. She’d forgotten.

“Oh,” Violet agrees. “I’m a Moran at my heart, but I gave up the name for a reason. I know how to protect myself, I know some tricks to stealing and hacking, but… I walked away from it, Joan. That’s why I’m so _angry_ that I have to be here. I walked away, I got out- and now I’m right back in it.”

Impulsively, Joan takes her hand. She hasn’t spent much time with Violet, not alone anyway. They’ve played cards and had some surface conversations, but that’s it. She’d managed to forget, somehow, that like her, Violet didn’t have a place in the life they were forced to live. 

“This is my world,” Joan says, the words tight in her throat. “But normally, I would be watching all of them get put in handcuffs and sent to jail. And I’d be the one who put them there.”

“I’d like to see you, someday, as a detective instead of a woman on the run,” Violet says. Then she laughs. “From a distance, at least. Hopefully I’ll be back on _Lordly Manor_ , and I’ll just read about your exploits in the newspaper.”

Joan laughs too. “I’d like that. I’ll watch your show and think, wow, I knew her when.”

They laugh together, and then fall silent. Joan squeezes Violet’s hand, and Violet squeezes back.

“Your family,” Joan says. “They’re not bad people. Well,” she amends when Violet gives her an incredulous look, “they’re bad people. But… they’re your family. You should go be with them.”

Violet sighs. “When I gave up my name, when I walked away, it was an all or nothing deal. If I am with them now, I’ll start seeing them as Great Aunt Aileen, who used to braid my hair, or Cousin Farouk, who taught me how to cook. Instead of Aileen who runs a criminal empire a lot like Moriarty’s, or Farouk who cooks meth. It’s too hard, Joan.”

It is too hard. She nods, and they sit in the bedroom until the party quiets down and everyone leaves.

******  
“I think I have it,” she says to herself.

“You cracked all the ciphers?” Violet says from behind her. Joan startles. She thought she was alone in the kitchen. It was a stupid thought, she realizes. Since the entire Moran family came over for dinner, they’ve been drifting in and out constantly. She thinks she could probably name most of the Morans now.

“No,” she says, and sits back. “But I know what kind of cipher was used for the different types of criminal. Which means I _can_ decrypt them, going forward.”

Violet comes over and sits at the table, putting a mug of tea in front of Joan. She takes it gratefully. “But how does that help us?” Violet asks.

“We can pick who to target, and then I can break apart whatever Slaney had on them in his records while we get to them. We’ll have an idea of who we’re facing, and maybe even what they’re meant to do. And if we can get their cell phone, I’ll be able to decrypt any messages that are on there.”

“That’s not much,” Violet says dubiously. Joan understands. It _isn’t_ much- it’s depressingly little, if she’s honest with herself. But it’s more than she had before. The timetable in her head, the clock ticking away behind her eyes, is reduced now that she knows how to find Moriarty’s lieutenants, and what they might be working on. It gives her a way forward.

“It’ll be enough,” she sighs, and closes her eyes.

She doesn’t think much time passes when the door to the shack flies open. Joan sits upright, her eyes snapping open. Moran is on the phone- not his phone, she realizes, but Slaney’s phone. He hits something on the phone, and Moriaty’s voice fills the shack.

“- think we can come to some sort of arrangement, Moran,” she’s saying, her voice a warm purr of sound.

“What makes you think I can be bought?” Moran snarls.

“Moran, surely you don’t want this to continue. Being on the run… it has to be hard. And your sister must want to return to her life. She must be miserable.”

Joan glances at Violet, whose lips are pursed in a thin line.

“I don’t know, Moriarty. Disrupting your life is well worth my time,” Moran says, but his voice wavers. Joan smiles. He enjoys playing with Moriarty far too much. She wonders if, in another life, Moriarty and Moran would have been enemies. Moran is certainly smart enough and connected enough to set up his own enterprise, had he wanted. She wonders if it would have made this entire thing easier or harder, if Moriarty had a rival in crime.

“Not worth that much. You used to be well paid. You used to have steak and champagne whenever you wanted. You used to stay in four star hotels, and hire the best escorts. Your circumstances now seem… sadly reduced. I can fix that for you, Sebastian.”

Her tone is seductive, and Joan thinks that, if it were someone else, she’d probably be spot on. Most of Moriarty’s people probably crave simple things, like money and power. Quantifiable things, from Moriarty’s perspective. Predictable things, which can be manipulated however Moriarty sees fit. Joan would admire it, if it were an academic exercise.

But people aren’t academic exercises, and Joan knows Moran better than Moriarty does at this point. She lost any clout with him when she took his sister. She lost it before that, really, when she set him up to take a fall for her. But Moriarty doesn’t know that, which is exactly why Joan suggested to Slaney that Moran could still be bought. She isn’t a Go player, not like Moriarty, and she only understands the most basic mechanics of game theory, but she knows people. People aren’t rational, not the way Moriarty thinks they should be. There are some things people aren’t willing to give up.

Moran is staring at Joan, grinning like he’s reading her mind, and then he settles his face into a characteristic scowl, saying, “How?”

Joan imagines Moriarty’s own predatory smile. “You took something I want, Moran. Give me back Joan, and I’ll make it worth your while. How does a five-figure sum sound?”

“Seven.”

“Greedy, greedy… thankfully business has been good. A seven-figure sum, then. Enough for you to live out the rest of your days, if you don’t blow it all.”

Moran sits down on the stool, setting the phone down gently on the rough wood of the table. Violet reaches over and grabs his arm. He pats her hand absently. “I want the money up front. I want you to put it into an account that I choose.”

“I’m stung by your lack of trust.”

“Tough. I don’t trust you. You’ll give me the money and leave me and mine alone. I’ll leave Watson in a public place for you.”

“You won’t meet me?”

Moran snorts. “If you think I’m getting within five hundred yards of you, Moriarty, you’re not as smart as everyone claims.”

The line is silent for a long time. Joan holds her breath. She thinks they all are.

“How do I know you’ll leave me Joan?” Moriarty finally says, her tone sharper and more irritated. She’s lost the seductive quality to her voice, and sounds more like a businessperson trying to negotiate the best deal they can in unfavorable circumstances. Joan remembers her mother out-negotiating a car salesman once. He had the same tone by the time her mother had signed the papers.

“If you think I want to drag that woman around anymore, you’re out of your mind,” he laughs. “The sooner I’m rid of her, the better. You can have her, once I get what’s mine.”

“Fine,” Moriarty bites out. “I want her in Trafalgar, one week from now.”

Joan looks at Moran in alarm, but he’s already on it. “Going to need longer than that, Moriarty,” he says easily. “I’m nowhere near there, and arranging travel… will take some time, let’s say.”

It’s a testament to how good the Moran family must be at hiding them, because Moriarty doesn’t sound suspicious when she says, “Fine. Two weeks. That’s all.”

“I get the money today, Moriarty. Or I keep Joan and go to ground.”

“I want the goods undamaged, Moran.”

“I told her before, and I’ll tell you now: I’m not a brute. Some bruises from her escape attempts, but that’s all,” he sneers. Joan stomach twists uneasily and she wraps her arms around herself. 

“Good enough,” Moriarty says.

Moran gives her an account and routing number, and then waits until his other phone confirms receipt of the money before he hangs up on Moriarty. He stands up and walks out of the shack, heading for the coast. Joan scrambles after him.

Standing on the cliff side, Moran puts Slaney’s phone in his pocket and then pulls out the phone he’s been using for the past week. He pulls out the battery out of the phone and throws it into the ocean, and then throws the rest of it. She thinks she should protest the littering- a trash can would have done just as well- but she can’t bring herself to care. She watches as Moran runs a hand over his head repeatedly, his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths. “Your people are waiting?” he asks gruffly, not looking at her.

Joan nods, knowing he won’t see her. “Everyone should be on it.” They knew that Moriarty would be tracing the money she sent, so they’d arranged for Farouk to send a false tip to Everyone about the money. Farouk told Everyone that the money was being moved by a corrupt government official; they just needed Everyone to intercede and move it somewhere else for them, so they could access it without Moriarty’s trace.

“Then we just need to get the money somehow.”

“Best as I can tell, Moriarty doesn’t have any operatives in Andorra.”

Moran blows out an explosive breath and turns around, giving her a short nod. “Then we’d best get moving.”

******  
In the back of a supply truck that’s going to take them into Andorra, they start working on the next plan.

“I think we should probably prioritize the eliminating of assassins,” Joan says. She points to the list. “Moriarty currently has four active, from what I can figure out. Moran, you’d know best- the jobs you worked for her, they usually had some pretty big consequences, right?”

Moran shrugs. “I think the other bloke you found probably handled the ones of greater importance, from what you’ve said about him. I tended to work on removing friends and family in order to put pressure on politicians to vote a certain way. Occasionally, from what I could tell, she had me handle community leaders, disrupting the equilibrium of the area. I was just a serial killer to the media, after all.”

Joan nods. “Right. So it maybe didn’t start wars or anything-”

“Ah, to be a Gavrilo Princip,” Moran says, almost lovingly. 

Joan’s stomach curdles, and she continues on. “- but you opened doors for Moriarty to accomplish whatever her larger goal was. You helped put pressure in the right places.”

He shrugs again. “Sure.”

“So if we remove her assassins, that’s four people who no longer can help her get what she wants.”

“Yeah, but the same could be said of the gun runners or the warlords or the thieves or even the art forgers,” Violet says, sounding frustrated. “All of them are doing things that help her get what she wants. Look at Woodley and Carruthers- they were just kidnappers, but they controlled Seb, who facilitated controlling you. Aren’t you making things too simplistic?”

She’s right, and Joan knows it. She closes her eyes and presses her fingers into the sockets. 

Joan is tired. She is tired, and she’s frustrated, and she has no idea how to do this. She was never the mastermind detective, the one who saw every angle and every potentiality. She was good at being a detective, but she wasn’t a natural, she wasn’t a _genius_. That was always-

She inhales sharply and opens her eyes. “You’re right,” Joan says. “But removing the assassins first means fewer people will die. And loss of life is an important factor here.”

It’s dark in the truck, but she thinks she can still see Moran smile. “And how do you think we’re going to remove them, Watson, if we don’t kill them? There’s still going to be loss of life involved.”

“No,” she says, voice hard. “There won’t be.”

She doesn’t know how yet. But she won’t descend into killing people. That’s what Moriarty wanted for Joan, at one point, or at least that was one possibility she wanted for her- Joan suspects Moriarty has five or six potential plots going at once, and she adjusts depending on how people react to things- and she won’t let Moriarty win. It’s bad enough she’s running all over the world with Moran, trusting him with her life. She won’t stoop to killling.

“Sure, Watson,” Moran says, and he sounds smug. “Whatever you say.”

******  
In Andorra, Moran finds them another terrible hotel and checks them in, using some of the last money they have to ensure their names aren’t on any official record. He and Violet fall asleep almost immediately, Violet’s snores echoing in the small, cramped room.

Joan lies awake, staring up at the ceiling, letting the tears sneak out of the corners of her eyes and onto her pillow. She can’t afford to really cry, but she needs some sort of release from all of this.

She’s lost track of how long she’s been away from New York and the brownstone. That life doesn’t feel real to her anymore. The only thing that feels real is fear and adrenaline, and the constant motion of whatever vehicle is sneaking them across borders. The only thing that feels real is stained, scratchy sheets and the fervent hope that _this_ hotel doesn’t have roaches.

She lets out a shaky breath.

Eventually, Violet will get sick of their constant movement and her inability to return to her career, and she’ll just leave. And then she’ll be killed, because Violet maybe knows how to steal a car, break into rooms, clone phones and laptops, and probably even how to fight, but she doesn’t know how to escape Moriarty.

Eventually, Moran will get fed up with Joan, and then he’ll either try to kill her, or he’ll leave too. And Joan will end up having to kill him herself in order to make sure he doesn’t kill her first, or Moran will end up dead in an alley somewhere, because he doesn’t know how to escape Moriarty.

Eventually, Joan’s luck is going to run out. Because she doesn’t know how to escape Moriarty either. She’s running as fast as she can, just hoping to maintain their current status quo.

The thought is overwhelming, and she bites her lip. She can’t dwell, she decides, and sits up, grabbing Moran’s newest phone off the nightstand between their beds and heading out into the hallway. She presses her back against the wall and sinks down to the floor, pretending that the carpet is plusher than it is, and that she doesn’t see a mouse a few doors away. She thumbs the phone on, and flips open the conspiracy message board.

There are a few more messages from Thelxinoe12, which she looks at first.

_I heard Viola Moran was seen in Manila. Odd place for her to be. Do you know anything about that?_

_Did you know Sebastian Moran is alive after all?_

_Please talk to me. I think I can help you._

She backs out of the message box. Thelxinoe12 has to be a plant of Moriarty’s, and one that’s getting pretty desperate, she thinks. Joan isn’t about to let Moriarty know that she is less of a prisoner than she thinks.

Her thread is still thriving, full of rumours about her being seen in China (very likely, given how long it took them to travel across it) and her secret government work in Marseilles.

_Joan Watson has agreed to be a government stooge, and is allowing them to experiment on her to create a new superhuman!_ one enthusiastic member says.

_She was doing chemistry experiments, helping design a new party drug,_ says someone else.

What Joan finds interesting about the comments isn’t the content, but the timing. None of the comments that mention her actual location ever appear until after she’s already left the country. She purses her lips, trying to figure out what that could mean. Either someone actually is tracking her- which has to be impossible, she thinks, because one thing Joan did very well during her training was figure out when she was being followed, and she and Moran check every day to make sure there are no tracking chips, and all GPS is turned off on the devices they’ve picked up along the way- or someone is suppressing any mentions of potential locations until they’re certain she can’t be there anymore.

Joan thinks that far more likely, but wonders. It’s only the ones that mention her actual location that she can tell haven’t been posted until after she’s left.

She pulls up the list of moderators of the forum, trying to determine who is playing puppet master. Conspiracy theorists, in her experience, don’t often repress information that could be potentially harmful. They don’t think like that. All the conspiracy theorists she’s ever met or known have insisted on freedom of information. It doesn’t make sense that a moderator would value privacy and secrecy on their own forum.

There are five moderators on this particular forum, and none of the user names look familiar or ring any bells with her. None of the user names even have any associations with ideas or things that she can link to people she knows. Frustrated, she closes the window and then clears the history so Moran can’t see what she was doing on his phone. 

She creeps back into their hotel room, shutting the door behind her silently and crawling back into her bed. She gets settled underneath the covers, and rolls onto her back.

The tears well up within seconds.

******  
Moran doesn’t wait for Joan to figure out how they’re going to remove Moriarty’s assassins from her web. He wakes Joan up and announces, “We’re going to Odessa.”

“Oksana Shevchuk?” she asks. She thinks about that for a moment. “You think she had something to do with the civil unrest in the Ukraine, back in 2014?”

“I think it sounds like Moriarty’s kind of game. And Oksana is currently there, so she might be waiting for her next job, or she might be actively working on something. Either way, the Ukraine is a powder keg, and making sure Moriarty doesn’t get her hands on the match is probably smart.”

It _is_ smart, and Joan is suspicious of Moran’s sudden altruism. “Do you know her?” she asks.

Moran rolls his eyes. “Amazingly, Moriarty kept her assassins separate. Too many cooks, that sort of thing.”

It doesn’t convince her, but she gets dressed anyway, Violet tossing her a hoodie when she’s done. Joan shakes her head. “I need to get rid of these. I used them in Manila, and I’m sure Moriarty has been all over the security footage by now. We’ll need to get new ones at some point.”

“I have to get the money,” Moran says. “After that, we’ll see about your hoodies. It’s going to be a long drive.”

“I call shot gun,” Violet says.

******  
Moriarty put just over a million dollars in Moran’s account. It’s a nice amount, but it does mean that it can’t just be pulled out in one go. It would be too heavy, for one.

They planned on this, though. Moran takes out just enough for the requisite bribes and travel expenses, and then Joan sets Everyone on it again. Another anonymous tip, and the money is divided into accounts all across Europe. Untraceable, as best as Joan can tell. She doesn’t like Everyone, but she has to admit that they’re good at what they do. Even if Moriarty realizes that they’re using Everyone- which she will, eventually, Joan think she’ll miss something like that- she’ll never be able to pinpoint where everything went, and Everyone will never tell her.

Her heart beats too fast, these days, for all the risks she’s taking.

******  
In another lifetime, Joan would have killed to drive all over Europe like this. The constant threat of capture or death ruins the experience a bit, though. She also spends most of her time on the way to Odessa staring at the laptop, trying to decrypt Oksana’s cipher.

She figures out that Slaney, after they cracked the code on Moran’s phone, stopped using straddle checkerboard ciphers for assassins and switched to a Hill cipher. Joan thinks it’s probably significant that for assassins a cipher named after a game and a cipher using matrices and matrix multiplication were selected, given Moriarty’s proclivities for game theory.

She wishes he’d stayed with the checkerboard. Joan’s math skills aren’t quite up to figuring out matrices and linear algebra and number theory. But she sticks with it for most of the trip, looking at the sample sheet he must have sent Oksana to get her set up. All the lieutenants have their own individual file on the computer, listed under their encrypted name from the original page, which contain two or three files apiece. She hasn’t quite figured out what those files are, other than encrypted.

When she isn’t working on Oksana’s cipher, she lets herself think about other information she’s gleaned since she began working against Moriarty. She keeps coming back to the history of Professor Jamison Moriarty, and the mystery of Godfrey Norton.

There is something significant, she thinks, in the fact that Jamison Moriarty emerges as a professor so young. Moriarty is younger than her, but she’s old enough now that it must have been one of her earliest aliases, her core one. And it means something, she thinks, that she was a professor of game theory. There’s a connection there, to the person she was before she became Jamie Moriarty. There just has to be. Joan knows Moriarty, and knows how she likes to have meaning in small things, likes to have her little jokes. There will be a connection between math and the person Moriarty was. Joan knows it.

As for Godfrey Norton…

His name is on the list of lieutenants, the only name outside of Slaney’s that Joan recognizes. But he has his own cipher, unique to everyone else’s. He doesn’t fit in as an assassin, a thief, a grifter, a gun runner, a kidnapper, none of them. The cipher used for him stands alone, much like everything else surrounding him.

That, too, has to be significant. He means something to Moriarty, something outside of the regular operations of her empire.

If Joan had to guess- _I don’t guess, I observe; and once I observe, I deduce_ \- she would say that like math, Norton has something to do with who Moriarty was before she was Moriarty. It makes sense- it might be why she wanted Joan to remove him from the playing field.

There are too many holes for Joan to put together a real working theory. So for what she can’t deduce, there is Google.

She looks up Norton obsessively, going through and finding anything she can about him. He’s the same age as Moriarty, Joan determines. He went to London Met for a year and then transferred out to Cambridge. He was a fairly successful barrister in England, and then abruptly moved to the United States.

She wonders if she can get her hands on old student records for London Met. It is possible Moriarty and Norton went to school together.

Joan puts the project aside, though, when they drive into Odessa. She shuts the laptop and looks at the buildings around her, as Moran tells her, “We’ll get a hotel, and then we’ll pay someone to go get your bloody hoodies.”

******  
Joan has spent most of the trip to Odessa thinking about how to accomplish the impossible. How to eliminate people from Moriarty’s network without allowing Moran to kill them.

The answer is astonishingly simple. She needs to stop thinking like a fugitive, or an intelligence operative, and more like what she really is: a detective.

Oksana Shevchuk is one of Moriarty’s operatives, yes. But she’s a criminal. And that means they can use the police to their favour.

“We need to get Oksana to do something illegal,” she explains to Moran and Violet, pacing at the end of their hotel beds. “Something big enough that we can get the police involved. Something big enough so that the police Moriarty inevitably pays off? Can’t do anything.”

Violet nods, but Moran snorts. “You make it sound easy.”

“It is easy,” she says sharply. “She’s a murderer. If we catch her trying to murder someone, she’s done.”

“You know another way she’s done?” Moran asks, and mimes firing a gun.

Violet purses her lips. Joan rolls her eyes. “Moran, I know this will surprise you, but there are solutions other than murder. Remember how we got you? Pinning you to your murders. You were out of the network.”

“Not enough, obviously,” Moran sneers.

She shoves the heels of her hands into her eyes, and then flings her arms up in the air. “It got you out of the game for months! Which is all I need, Moran. I just need some time.”

Moran stares at her, eyes dark. Joan stares back. She won’t become a murderer. Not when she’s made it this far. 

He grits his teeth, finally, and nods. “Fine, Watson. We play it your way. I’ll be a good Boy Scout.”

She lets out a breath. “Okay. Let’s get started.”

******  
Moran steals some files from the police station and plants a key logger so they can track anything that comes up. And he tails Oksana when she leaves her apartment, which isn’t often. He takes photos and brings them back to Joan.

Violet talks to people around the neighborhood, making friends as a new arrival. She talks to them, and learns about other people in the neighborhood. She learns about Sonia, who makes baked goods for everyone, and Andrei, who is quickly racking up the juvenile offenses, much to his mother’s dismay. And Oksana, who bought a gun from Yuri just a few weeks back, claiming she was nervous about her ex-boyfriend.

Violet and Moran both bring her newspapers.

Joan… does nothing. She paces in the hotel room while Violet and Moran are gone during the day, chewing on her nails. She takes up smoking, for nothing better to do, and lights cigarettes with shaking hands. She wonders if she’s really good enough to do this, if she can pull it off. If all she ever was was an extension of someone else. She looks through the photographs and police files that Moran brings her, writes down the pertinent pieces of Violet’s information and tacks it to the crappy drywall. She reads newspapers nonstop, looking for the clues, a Ukrainian-English dictionary next to her. She sits on the floor and stares at the wall, smoking cigarette after cigarette and hating everything.

She solves it on their fifth day in the city.

Violet is taking a shower, back from her day of spying. Joan flips frantically through the stack of newspapers, trying to find the article she’s thinking about. She hears the door open behind her and doesn’t even look up. She knows it’s Moran; she can tell from the footfalls. She needs to find the article.

“I have it,” she says, still digging. “I have it, Moran, I know what Oksana is here for. I know who her target is. I know how we can stop her.”

Her hands are shaking so hard that it’s difficult to turn the pages of the flimsy newscopies. But she does it, she finds it, and she flings it at Moran. “That. That’s it.”

Moran catches the newspaper and looks at it, his brow wrinkling. “This is a listing for a farmer’s market, Watson.”

She ignores his disbelieving tone. “Look at the stall vendors, Moran. Fourth listing.”

“Ivan Lysenko. He’s selling rice.”

“Ivan Lysenko,” Joan tells him, sitting on the edge of the bed and digging out a new cigarette, “is not just a rice farmer. He is a biological engineer who leads a team engineering a disease resistant strain of rice.”

Moran still looks disbelieving. She flings herself to the ground, digging through another mound of papers until she finds the one she’s looking for. “Moriarty has a bioengineer on staff, too. What do you want to bet that she has her person designing a disease? And look at this- Oksana named an Ivan as her ex when she bought the gun.”

“Maybe because Ivan is one of the most common names in the Ukraine?”

“No,” Joan says. She points at the wall. “That police report says that Ivan requested a police presence at his work because he thought he was being followed. Moran, this is it. This is Oksana. This is Moriarty.”

Moran sighs, and sits down on the edge of the bed and staring at Joan’s wall. He rubs a hand over his head and leans forward. “You think Moriarty has put a notice on Lysenko in order to stop his invention? Because she has created something else?”

“Rice is a staple food in, like, a hundred countries around the world. Being able to devastate a crop, without hope of someone coming along to fix it? Could mean millions for Moriarty. Billions. It could change the world economy. Why do you think people put so much money into bioengineering? Our world food source is fragile; a small imbalance can throw off everything,” she argues.

“And you think this farmer’s market is the target?” Moran asks, picking the newspaper back up and looking at it again, this time looking far more serious. He believes her, even if he doesn’t want to.

She takes a steadying breath, the jitters wearing off. She puts out the cigarette. “Since Ivan’s request, the police escort him to work and from work. The farmer’s market is probably the only place Oksana can get to him safely. Lots of people to blend in with, and lots of chaos when shots are fired.”

He runs a hand over his mouth, and slowly nods. “All right. All right, yeah. I can see that.”

Joan nods with him. “I’ve got a plan.”

******  
She lights a cigarette and presses the phone against her ear, pretending to be interested in the leeks she’s looking at. “Anything yet?” she asks.

Her hoodie is up, her makeup is done, and she’s wearing a pair of jeans three sizes too large, carefully padded to make her figure fuller. It should be enough to make her uninteresting, should she be seen on any CCTVs, though there aren’t many in the area. She’s still jittery, though. The cigarette is helping. She wishes it wasn’t.

“No, not yet,” Moran says. “Vi’s in position, though. She’ll get it.”

“You really think that’s where Oksana will be?” she asks, and picks up a bundle of leeks, inspecting them. They’re in good shape, actually.

“It’s where I’d be,” he says. He sounds distracted. That’s good, she thinks. She wants him to be paying more attention to looking for Oksana than her. “And if she’s smart, that’s where she’ll be. It’s the best position in the whole place.”

Joan drops the cigarette and stamps it out, stooping down to grab the butt and put it in her pocket. While standing, she swivels to look at Lysenko.

He’s fine. He’s at this stand, smiling and shaking hands with people, even as he passes out bags full of rice, and the occasional vegetable. His wife is with him, a short, fat, white woman with smile lines on her face and thick, capable hands. Whenever they aren’t helping a customer, they smile at each other, kiss, hold hands. They love each other. It hurts to look at. So she doesn’t.

Instead, she looks around her, keeping the phone to her ear. She pulls out another cigarette.

“Violet will be okay?” she asks.

“Vi’s taking photos. She’s got the easy part. Now shut up. I’m trying to focus.”

Joan does as he says. In a situation like this, he actually has more experience. She’s caught more than her fair share of murderers, but she hasn’t done that much with killers for hire, or snipers. It’s on Moran, now. She trusts he’ll come through.

It’s a sign of how far she’s fallen.

The shots come almost an hour later. Joan has bought a bushel of apples at that point, trying to find a way to justify her continued presence. She’s turned away from Lysenko when it happens, and only has the sharp inhalation from Moran as a warning. It’s enough; she is already turned and running when the first shot goes off, already halfway across the farmers market. Before the second shot comes, she’s barreling into Lysenko, forcing him to the ground, where his wife has sensibly dropped. Joan reaches up and flips the table his produce is on over, huddling behind it as a third shot is fired. She feels it impact the table.

“Are you okay?” she asks Lysenko.

He’s pale, shaking, and he doesn’t say anything, instead reaching for his wife. When he extends his arm, Joan sees the red stain on his arm. A fourth shot is fired, hitting the dirt to the left of them. She grabs Lysenko’s arm and tears at his shirt sleeve. A fifth shot goes off, but Joan doesn’t see where the bullet goes. Not near them, as best as she can tell. Lysenko’s wife is sobbing into the dirt next to them, her arms over her head. Lysenko tries to shove Joan off of him, but she holds on, looking at his arm as best as she can. It’s chaotic and tumultuous, but she thinks there is a bullet in Lysenko’s arm. Nonlethal, though. She thinks.

Lysenko says something to her, but Joan’s Ukrainian is limited to translating the newspaper one word at a time from a dictionary, so she isn’t sure what he wants. He’s probably asking what’s happening. Or if the shooting is done- it’s been a while since the last gunshot. Joan shrugs helplessly, gesturing at him to stay down.

“Watson!” she hears, and she looks at Lysenko, confused at why he would know her name. Briefly, she feels cold dread pooling in her stomach. He is a plant, she thinks, meant to lure her out for Moriarty to catch them all. She didn’t save his life; she ended hers. But rationality comes through a split second later, and she remembers the phone clutched in her hand. She presses it against her ear. 

“Moran,” she says. “You have her?”

“Yeah, we got what we needed. The rice bloke all right?”

Joan looks at him with a critical eye, and nods to herself. “He’ll survive, I think. Her first or second shot hit him.”

Moran grunts. “Good. It will hurt Oksana even more if he’s injured. Now get out of there, the police will be there soon.”

Joan switches off the phone and drops it on the ground, smashing it with the heel of her book and kicking some dirt over it. She reaches out, smiles as reassuringly as she can at Lysenko and his wife, turns, and runs.

******  
When she gets back to their hotel, Moran is already half packed and Violet is nowhere to be seen. Joan pulls her hair out of her bun and lets it fall over her face. “Violet at the police department?”

“She should be dropping off the film now,” Moran says. He shoves three hoodies into her duffel bag and then tosses it to her. She catches it and slings it over her shoulder.

“How long before-”

“Given that it was an assassination attempt, they should have Oksana in custody within twenty-four hours. She’ll be fast, though. There’s a small chance they’ll miss her, if they don’t shut down the airports in time. Or the borders.”

“Which means that within twenty-five hours, Moriarty will know what we did,” Joan says, and blows out a breath, running a hand through her hair, still startled by how short it is. She’s gotten used to the color. “We need to be out of the country by then, Moran. If they shut down the borders…”

Moran turns, tossing two duffel bags over his shoulder, a ghoulish smile on his face. “Watson, I thought you knew me better than that by now… I have our way out of the country. Now let’s go; we need to get Vi.”

******  
Joan lifts a smartphone from a pedestrian before she allows Moran to bundle her into the back of a supply truck. Violet is already there, engrossed in a handheld video game that Moran picked up for her a few days back. “Hi Joan,” she says absently. Joan waves and sits down on a crate, pulling up a web browser after shutting off the GPS. She needs to monitor the news.

It’s difficult, with the jostling of the truck, to translate the Ukrainian new sites, but she does her best, refreshing the page repeatedly. They’ve only been on the road for seven hours when Oksana’s face becomes the headline photo. Joan licks her lips. “She’s been arrested,” she says, mouth numb.

Vi’s head shoots up. “Already?”

“I guess they were invested,” Joan says, though she suspects it has more to do with Moriarty cutting her loose as soon as she realized that Oksana was compromised. “Moriarty will call soon.”

“Do you know where Seb is taking us?” Vi asks, carefully making her way over to sit on the crate next to Joan.

She shakes her head. “No. The less he tells me about our specific travel plans, the better.”

They sit in silence for a while, the truck rocking them from side to side. Joan grips her knees tightly. This is the first person they’ve removed from Moriarty’s network, completely independently. Woodley and Carruthers were attached to Violet, and Slaney was through Moran. Oksana is their real test case. What happens after taking her out will help Joan determine just how bad this is going to get.

Violet’s hand appears in the edge of her vision, inching over, and finally gripping Joan’s hand tightly. “We’re going to get through this,” Violet says, her voice thin and scared. She sounds like she’s trying to convince herself, more than Joan.

Joan squeezes her hand back, and makes sure her voice is firm and strong before she replies, “Yes, we are.”

She wills herself to believe it.

******  
They reach Minsk without incident. Violet hops down out of the truck, and then waves Joan down. She goes, and then Violet shoves her toward their latest hotel room, her face twisted into an ugly sneer that makes the resemblance between her and Moran obvious.

There is a security camera on the corner of the building.

Once inside, Joan drops down onto the end of the bed, digging into her bag and pulling out the smart phone she stole. She pulls up the news, trying to see if there is anything new since she last checked it, twenty minutes ago.

Nothing yet. The news cycle is already moving on to different things.

Moran slams into the hotel room a moment later, already pacing. “She has to know by now,” he snaps at Joan.

“She might be a little busy making sure nobody can trace Oksana to her right now,” she suggests. She doesn’t believe it. She grabs the bag with Slaney’s laptop and pulls it out. She needs to figure out where they’re going next. Who their next target is. They’ve declared their intentions, now, in an undeniable way. The timeline is shorter than ever, and not for good reasons. Moriarty will be angry.

Joan focuses on thinking like a game theorist as she works. If she were Moriarty, would she expect Moran to continue to take down assassins? Or would she think he would move on to someone else? Where would it be best for Moriarty to be, who should she protect? Who should Moran remove from the board next?

She regrets not having a book on game theory with her.

After a while she feels the bed dip slightly. Joan looks up. Violet is sitting next to her, biting her lip. She raises an eyebrow in question.

“Let me help?” Violet asks quietly. “I don’t think I can do anything with the ciphers, but I want to do something. I feel like dead weight.”

She’s anything but dead weight, given the things she’s stolen for Joan, but she understands the feeling all too well. Teaching Violet how to decrypt ciphers would take too long, she thinks, but she can hand her one of the long-term projects, she thinks.

“I’m trying to find a man named Godfrey Norton,” she says. “He’s a barrister or a lawyer. He was recently in the United States, but he disappeared and I haven’t been able to find him anywhere. I need to find him, and I need to know everything about him.”

Violet nods. “Okay. I’ll have Seb get me my own laptop.”

Violet walks over to Moran, who is still pacing and muttering angrily under his breath. Joan returns to her work. She doesn’t need to watch the fight that will ensue once Violet makes her request. She just needs to figure out their next move.

******  
By the following evening, they still haven’t heard anything for Moriarty. It’s frightening. Joan thinks it bodes poorly for them, that it means that Moriarty is working on something on her end. Moran agrees. She can tell by the way he goes more and more silent and sullen.

Violet chatters to fill the silence, eyes darting nervously between them.

“I know who we should go after next,” Joan says quietly, interrupting Violet midstream.

Moran’s head jerks up. “Who?”

“There’s a gun runner in Zadar. Darijo Radomir. I remember his name. One of my friends in the NYPD was working on a case where his name came up, something to do with providing weapons to rival crime families, I don’t know. It never came to anything, but I might have a little more luck, if I’m in Croatia.”

“Will it take long?”

Joan sighs and rolls her eyes. “I don’t know, Moran. I won’t know until I’m in Croatia and we find him, and I can see what we have to work with.”

“It needs to be fast. Moriarty won’t be content to sit and wait anymore. The moment one of us turns up on a camera, she’ll move in.”

“That was true before, Moran.”

“It’s worse now.”

They stare at each other, the air tense between them. Violet clears her throat. “I can look up murders in the general area that had guns involved. Within three or four countries, maybe. You could maybe link him to those guns?”

Joan blinks and turns away from Moran. “Yeah, that might help. While we travel, you can look into that and I’ll work on breaking all the codes in his file.”

Violet nods and pulls her new laptop up, clearly preparing to get to work. Joan walks into the bathroom, thinking of taking a shower and letting her brain relax for five minutes, but Moran follows her and closes the bathroom door behind them.

Fear floods through her, and she begins figuring out what in the bathroom might make a good weapon against Moran, but he just crosses his arms and leans against the door.

“How am I supposed to explain all this to Moriarty, Watson?” he asks, his voice low.

Joan raises an eyebrow. “Explain what?”

Moran scowls. “Not killing Oksana, figuring out Radomir’s crimes and, I assume, turning him over to the police.”

“Why do you need to explain it at all?”

Moran huffs and sits down on the edge of the bathtub. After a moment, Joan sits down on the toilet. She isn’t sure what he’s doing, and why he’s talking to her like this. She can admit that they have a strange relationship, a bond almost, but they aren’t _friends_. 

“Watson. As far as Moriarty knows, you’re my hostage. I can see her accepting that I’m forcing you to figure out who her lieutenants are so that I can hunt them, but she’s going to be suspicious if ‘I’ start solving crimes and letting the police handle everything.”

She shakes her head. “It makes sense for you to let the police take over. They might be able to extract more information about Moriarty and her organization.”

“That I wouldn’t be able to extract through my own methods? Torture doesn’t work, but it would scare her people. And I’m a scary man. Not a thinker.”

“You’re smarter than you let on.”

Moran nods his acceptance of that, but presses on. “But I kill people first, without question. Watson, you don’t want to get your hands dirty. I can’t say that I respect that, but I can see why a do-gooder like you thinks that way. Problem is, Moriarty can see that too. And if crimes are solved and police involved, and the good guys save the day, she’s going to know you aren’t my hostage. And that means-”

“My deal with her is null and void,” Joan says hollowly.

“And a lot more people start to get hurt. People you want to protect.”

Joan closes her eyes tight, as tight as she can, to hold back the tears. She can cry at night, but she can’t cry in front of Moran. She can’t let him see how tired she is, and how she’s barely holding herself together. He needs to follow her as blindly as he followed Moriarty, and that means she has to be steel and iron, and just as unyielding. 

“You don’t have to do it, Joan,” Moran says, and his voice is almost… gentle. “You never have to kill anyone. I’ll do it for you. Gladly.”

She doesn’t want to become a killer. Even if someone else holds the gun or the knife, she’d still be aiming them. She’d still be the one deciding their fate. And she can’t do that.

But Moriarty can’t know that Joan is pulling the reins, or everyone that she’s trying to save will die. 

“Your sister,” she blurts, the thought popping into her head in an instant. She opens her eyes, Moran’s surprised face not far from hers. “Your sister. She can be your excuse. Violet isn’t a killer. And she loves her big brother. She wants to believe her big brother is more than an assassin.”

Moran makes a face and opens his mouth, but then stops. He closes his mouth and a thoughtful expression appears on his face as he considers. Joan holds her breath.

“It won’t work forever,” he says. “But it might keep Moriarty from figuring out the truth for a while. Maybe.” Moran stands up and brushes off his pants. He turns and starts to open the door, then pauses. “Have you thought about the end of this, Watson? Have you considered what you’re going to do when there are no more lieutenants, and it’s just Moriarty left? She’s too dangerous to be left alive, you know.”

Joan does know. She nods tersely at Moran, who shakes his head but leaves her alone in the bathroom. Joan stands up, her legs unsteady, and turns the taps on for the shower.

She does know. And she hasn’t figured out what she’s going to do once she gets there. For now, she wants to focus on Radomir and the best way to solve his crimes quickly and quietly.

******  
They go to Croatia. Moran gets her some new hoodies, and escorts her, forcibly when near cameras, to the docks so she can sneak through warehouses and poke her nose into cargo. Violet stays in the hotel and researches gun crimes where the gun wasn’t registered. Moran and Joan break into police precincts at night and take pictures of files. Violet sits outside Radomir’s apartment, following him when he leaves and taking pictures.

The entire enterprise takes a little more than a week. Moran drops off their file of evidence and tip offs to the police on their eighth day in Zadar, and then they hop a freight train that takes them north. They slip over the border into Slovenia and get a hotel so that Joan can determine who she should go after next.

Nothing from Moriarty.

******  
They remove two thieves and a fixer from Moriarty’s network over the next month, chasing them across Europe and through an extended stay in Turkey in order to gather enough evidence. Violet suggests they send their files to Interpol, given the number of crimes committed in different countries, and Joan follows her advice. She’s careful to send the file to someone she doesn’t know; she didn’t make many contacts with Interpol when she was in New York, but she still had a few, and some of them could possibly see her hand in the work.

Joan loses weight and gives up smoking. Violet gains dark circles under her eyes and has nightmares that wake Joan and Moran up. Moran takes up smoking and stops shaving. But finally, the call comes. And it’s more of a disaster than Joan expected.

They’re in Pristina when Moriarty calls. Joan has designs on taking down a warlord in the area, but they’ve only just arrived and haven’t quite figured out how to do it yet. She’s sitting with a map in front of her, Violet pressed against her side with her laptop open as she flips through government websites. Moran is watching television.

It’s ordinary, for them.

Slaney’s phone, which is always placed in the center of the nightstand (when their hotel has one), rings.

Joan jerks, accidentally elbowing Violet. Violet makes a squeaking sound, but looks at Moran instead. Moran stares at the phone, and then slowly reaches over to turn off the television. He lifts the phone, staring at it for another moment before he thumbs it on and switches it to speakerphone.

“Moriarty,” he says, and his voice doesn’t betray a thing, sounding as pleased and relaxed as Moriarty always sounds.

“Moran,” Moriarty says, her voice is tense. “I see you betrayed our deal.”

“Are you honestly surprised?” Moran asks, and then laughs. “Thought you were the criminal mastermind.”

There is a moment of silence, but when Moriarty speaks again, she sounds more in control. “I had rather hoped you would come to your senses and do the right thing, Moran, but you’re right; I am a criminal mastermind. Did you think I wouldn’t have a contingency in place, if you broke your word?”

Moran laughs again, but Joan can see that he’s worried. She wants to tell him that she’s certain the money can’t be traced, but she can’t. She bites hard on her lip, the pain keeping her honest. “I am up a million dollars, I have my sister, and I still have your little pet.”

“Not to mention removing several of my players from the board,” she says, anger leaking into her words. “I’m surprised at you, Moran. A bullet through the head was always your favored method of eliminating people, before I found you and made you into an artist.”

Moran shoots Joan a look. “My sister,” he says easily. “She doesn’t like blood much. Believes in her big brother.”

“Her only family,” Moriarty says.

“Sure,” Moran replies.

“No, Moran. That’s a statement of fact. Did you think I wouldn’t find out about your family in Marseilles?”

Next to her, Violet stiffens. Joan grabs her hand.

“I found your sister, Moran,” Moriarty says. Her voice is more snarl than purr. “And she’d erased her past and changed her name. It wasn’t difficult at all, finding the Marseilles Morans. Farouk was a nice boy- he died quietly, with some dignity. But his sisters and brothers, they were messy and loud. They tried to fight. It was a pleasure, putting them down one by one. The children screamed for their parents. I made sure they went quickly, if it’s any consolation.”

Moran goes pale during her recitation. Violet starts to cry silently. Joan stares at the phone, tasting blood in her mouth.

“And of course, Aileen. Your darling Aunt Aileen. Would you like to talk to her one last time, Moran? I saved something special for her. Brought in a specialist, someone new.” Moriarty’s voice goes quieter for a moment as she says to someone else on her end, “He’s going to kill you slowly, Aileen. Very, very slowly.”

“Let me talk to her,” Moran croaks.

“Of course,” Moriarty says agreeably.

There is a loud gunshot on Moriarty’s end of the call. Joan rocks back. Violet screams- _wails_.

“Oops,” Moriarty says, laughing. “Guess you’re not the only one that can go back on their word.”

Joan wraps her arms around Violet and pulls her into her shoulder, muffling her cries. Moran covers his face with one hand and manages to grit out, “Moriarty, I’m going to kill you.”

“You are going to die a pathetic, meaningless death, just like your aunt here. Did you think you could get away with this, Moran? Did you think I would just _let this happen_ and do nothing? Did you think you were safe just because I haven’t laid hands on you yet? You declared war, Moran. I am going to _end_ you and your entire line. There will not be a _single_ Moran left on this earth. I hope keeping Joan from me was worth your family, Moran.”

It’s the first time Joan has ever heard Moriarty speak with anything less than control. Her voice, usually so polished and pristine, is dark and hard and angrier than she has ever heard it. A part of her rejoices at having cracked Moriarty like that. 

The part of her that is still recognizable wants to cry at what it cost.

Moriarty is still raging, but Moran reaches over and ends the call. He keeps his eyes on the phone, his hands resting on his knees. Joan strokes Violet’s hair, and slowly, tentatively, reaches out toward Moran.

He brushes off her hand and stands, grabbing the cell phone. “We don’t need this anymore,” he says, and then throws it into the wall with such force that the plaster crumbles underneath the impact. The phone cracks and lands on the floor. Moran walks over and stomps on it, face growing more and more red with each slam of his foot.

When he’s done, the phone isn’t recognizable anymore. He stands over it, panting. Then he rolls his shoulders back and turns, his face a blank mask. “We need to go. We can’t stay here. We’ll worry about your warlord later, Watson.”

Joan carries the bags. Moran carries his sister. None of them say a word.

******  
The murder of the Moran family is in the news the next day. Joan looks at the newspaper, thankful that Austrian newspapers are in German and thus somewhat intelligible to her. She buys a copy and then sits down in a nearby coffee shop, checking to make sure her hood is up and that her back is to the security camera.

A mass suicide, the newspapers say, and Joan wonders if Moriarty paid off the media or if she paid off the police. She would bet the latter. Police ruling it a mass suicide means that no one will look any further.

She wonders if there are any consulting detectives in Marseilles, and then squashes the thought. She leaves the newspaper behind and walks out. She is headed for a cyber café so that she can dig around without anyone watching her.

When she left their hotel that morning, Violet was basically catatonic on the bed. Moran wasn’t much better, though he nodded at her when she told him she was going out. She expects he’ll lash out at her once he fully wraps his head around what happened. Joan can’t blame him. It’s her fault his family is dead. She needs to figure out a way to keep him loyal to her, just long enough for her to finish her work. After that, whatever happens, happens.

She reaches the café and pays a kid to login and then vacate the computer. She sits down behind it and immediately pulls up the conspiracy theory website. She ignores the personal message notifications, not having the energy to deal with the mystery of Thelxinoe12, and instead goes about creating a new account, after not seeing what she wants. She creates a new email to link to the account, and once she’s good to go, she creates a new topic:

THE MORAN MASS SUICIDE WAS NO SUICIDE 

Joan blathers about government sanctioned murders and hit squads for a while, and leaves it. Hopefully, someone will do some real research and discover the truth. If they can figure out that the Moran family didn’t kill themselves, they might be able to figure out who did kill them, and why. And then maybe someone will realize she’s alive, and be willing to help her.

She switches back to her other, older account, and stares at the message notifications for a while. She moves the mouse, hovering over the icon.

She logs out.

******  
Joan keeps them moving as best she can. She focuses on taking down the more minor lieutenants from far away- hackers and forgers and grifters, mostly, people whose crimes she can find without being in the same country as them. She only manages to pull down one in a solid month, but she finds evidence of crimes from the others and stores it in files, confident that she will find more and be able to do more once she isn’t alone.

Violet is a shell. She loses too much weight, and Joan has to practically force her to eat every day. She barely talks, and looks with disinterest at everything Joan tries to show her. She sleeps more and more, huddled in a ball in the middle of the bed.

Moran drinks.

He never drinks too much, Joan notices- never enough to compromise himself, were they attacked. But he drinks steadily throughout the day, watching the television and barely blinking. When he does talk, he tells Joan about spending holidays with Aileen. About running around with his cousins. How Farouk taught him how to shoot a gun, which brought an end to his holidays with Aileen. It’s listless and rambling, but Joan sits still and listens to it.

Penance, she thinks.

Another month passes, and Joan manages to put away two more hackers and a kidnapper. She nearly gets caught, taking down the kidnapper, only managing to keep her identity secret by folding herself into a dumbwaiter and sitting there for close to a full day, waiting for the police to leave the scene. When she gets back to the hotel, Moran doesn’t even acknowledge her.

It’s grueling, exhausting, without anyone helping her. She manages it, but she knows she can’t keep going like that. She needs to figure something out, and soon.

******  
“Come on,” she says, and grabs Moran’s wrist, tugging.

Moran looks at her with blank, empty eyes. “What?”

“We’re going out. Come on.”

“Watson…” he growls. She ignores him and keeps pulling. Eventually he stands up with a sigh of disgust. “All right, I’m up. What do you want?”

Joan tosses a beanie at him, and then his coat. It’s cold in Estonia this time of year. “Like I said, we’re going out.” Moran glances over uneasily at Violet, who is picking at her sprat sandwich.

“Go on, Seb,” Violet says, voice colorless. “I’ll be okay, I promise.” She lifts her head and offers him a ghoulish smile. Joan winces.

Moran looks unconvinced, but he nods reluctantly. “Fine. Call if you need anything.”

Moran follows Joan through the streets, silent at her back. That’s fine by Joan. She focuses on not slipping and falling, the snow making the streets slick. She navigates through the twisting, winding streets, trying to remember the landmarks she picked out when she did this route in the day. She manages, though, and uses her lockpicks to get them into the building she wanted.

When they’re inside, Moran gives her an incredulous look. “A gym, Watson?”

“A boxing gym,” she corrects. She heads over to the equipment. “I feel like my form has suffered. I need to fix it.”

Moran still looks disbelieving, but he sheds his coat and hat once Joan does, and starts to put on the equipment without further argument. Joan glances up at the cameras, relieved to see that they’re still out- she had picked this gym for a reason.

She and Moran get into the ring, and begin.

It goes slow, at first. Despite being who he is, Moran has always been reluctant to hit her, even when he was working on self-defense with her. Joan has found it darkly ironic that he’ll happily kill a woman, hang her upside down and slowly drain her of all her blood, but he won’t hit one. She supposes she should be mildly grateful for it, since they have to work together.

Soon, though, Moran starts really sparring with her, and his punches are more brutal. Like Joan hoped, he starts getting sloppy, forgetting his form in the simple satisfaction of hitting her, over and over and over again. Joan blocks his hits, darts out of his way, but she can tell he’s satisfied to pummel her, even if the blows don’t do permanent damage.

They go like that for an hour, Moran relentless while Joan focuses on keeping herself in one piece, until finally Moran drops his arms, his chest heaving. “All right,” he gasps. “You’ve made your point.”

“I don’t have a point,” she says, which is true enough.

Moran tugs off his head gear and rolls his eyes. “You wanted me to get it out of my system, didn’t you?”

Joan walks over and slips between the ropes, easing herself down to the floor. She gets her gloves off, leaving her hands wrapped, and walks over to where a vending machine leans against the wall. It is an old vending machine, and the lock isn’t in the best condition, so it only takes a second with her lock picks before she cracks open the machine and tosses Moran a water bottle, taking one for herself. She walks over and sits next to Moran on the bench and takes a long sip before setting it aside to work on removing the tape from her hands.

“I need you to get back to work, Moran,” Joan says, forcing her voice to be steady. “I am so incredibly sorry about your family. But as long as I’m doing this by myself, I can’t bring down Moriarty. I can’t make their deaths mean something.”

Moran grunts. “Death never means anything, Watson. Killing Moriarty isn’t going to make their being gone any better.”

Joan looks at him in surprise. “I would have thought you wanted revenge.”

Moran takes a long drink from the water bottle, chugging until there is only half of the bottle left. He wipes his mouth and gives Joan a frightening grin, one that promises death. “Oh, I want revenge, Watson. I want to make that bitch bleed. But I won’t lie to myself that it will make my family’s deaths any better. It’ll just make me feel better. And maybe Vi.”

“I am… I’m so sorry. This is my fault.”

“Yeah,” Moran says easily. “It is. It’s absolutely your fault. I will never let you forget it. It’s mine, too, though. I should have done better by them, never taken us there. That’s a burden we’ll have to share.”

Joan winces. She looks down at her hands, partially free of the tape, and wonders if there was anything she could have done to prevent their deaths, if there is any platitude she can offer to make it better.

There isn’t.

“What do we do about Violet?” she asks quietly.

“You stay away from her,” Moran says, voice harsh. “You let me take care of my sister.”

“Moran… I mean it when I say we need to start working again. If Violet…”

“Vi is my problem. I’ll get her to understand.”

They sit quietly for a while longer, and finally Joan stands up. “We need to go.”

Moran nods and stands as well. “Oh, and Watson?”

Joan turns to look at him, and is blindsided by the punch Moran lands on her jaw and cheek. She wheels back, blood filling her mouth instantly, and grabs at a wall to steady herself. She holds a hand to her mouth for a moment, carefully checking that her teeth are all where they’re supposed to be, pressing her fingers against her cheekbone to make sure it isn’t broken. Everything is fine; he clearly pulled his punch. She looks back at Moran, blinking through the pain.

“That’s for getting my family killed,” he says. “Sorry, love, but boxing just wasn’t going to cut it.”

She considers spitting the blood in her mouth onto the floor, but decides against leaving DNA behind. “I hope it’s out of your system now,” she slurs.

Moran smirks. “Close enough. Now let’s destroy that woman.”

******  
Joan doesn’t know how Moran does it, but the next day, Violet is up, showered, dressed, and ready to go.

“I want us to go after an assassin next,” she announces. 

Joan blinks. “Why?”

Violet’s face is hard, harder than Moran’s has ever been. “Because it was probably an assassin that helped kill my family. And I want to make them pay.”

Joan glances over at Moran, but his face is stony like Violet’s, and impossible to read.

“All right,” she says. “We need to go to Norway.”

******  
The assassin in Norway doesn’t take much time at all, at least compared to what Joan has been doing lately. It takes them three weeks to lay the trap for Karl Larsen, who executes people using vehicles to make it appear an accident. The murder he committed using a paddleboat was, Joan has to admit, clever.

Finding the sabotaged equipment from previous accidents takes time, but Violet willingly flings herself into going all over the country to the different mechanics and police stations to find them. She brings back photos, occasionally she brings pieces of the vehicles if she can manage it. She sits with Joan, watching her work, asking questions incessantly. Before, Joan was thankful for the bits of help she did provide. Now it’s like training an apprentice, and it scares her.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Joan says to her one night. Moran is out watching Larsen, trying to pinpoint who his latest target is. It’s just them tonight.

“I know,” Violet says. “But I didn’t help much before, and my entire family ended up dead. They weren’t good people, Joan. I know that. But they were mine.”

She nods. “I know how that feels. I am sorry, Violet.”

Violet shakes her head and presses her fingers into her eyes. “It isn’t your fault. I know Seb blames you. But I don’t.”

“Who do you blame?” Joan asks softly. She pauses in sifting through Violet’s photos, wanting to hear her answer.

“Everyone, no one, I don’t know. Moriarty, I guess. They wouldn’t be dead, except for her. Me. I blame myself. Seb, sometimes.”

“Why not me, then? It definitely wasn’t your fault.”

Violet opens her eyes again and leans back against the wall, letting her hands rest on top of the pile of photos in her lap. “I don’t know if you remember, Joan, but it was my idea to go to Marseilles in the first place,” she says, voice barely above a whisper.

Joan grabs her hand. “And it was my idea to work against Moriarty. And it was Seb’s decision to work for Moriarty to begin with. Vi, we can follow this rabbit hole all the way down, but it all comes back to one person.”

“Moriarty.”

“Moriarty.”

They sit quietly. Violet squeezes her hand. “What are you going to do, once this is all done?”

Joan hasn’t even begun to consider it. She can’t let herself begin to imagine what she would do. If she thinks about that, she could lose focus, and miss something. It only takes one mistake to ruin everything. “I don’t know,” she says honestly.

“I wanted to go back to acting, to my job,” Violet says. She shrugs one shoulder. “Now, I don’t know. How can I go back to my life after all of this? How do I pretend things are normal?”

Joan can’t answer. She doesn’t know.

******  
After they’re done in Norway, they move on to Prague. There are only two more assassins left in the roster, and Violet is still fierce about removing them.

It’s been one year since Joan disappeared. Since she “died.” She tries not to think about it. She tries to focus on Prague.

Prague goes wrong.

Joan doesn’t know how it happens, but she wakes up in the middle of the night, certain that something is wrong. She opens her eyes slowly, peering through her eyelashes. She doesn’t see anyone else, but she can’t see the entire room. She sees Moran, though, his eyes open too. He slowly presses one finger against his lips, hushing her, and sits up. He grabs the gun off the side table and stands. Joan sits up slowly too, putting her hand on Violet’s shoulder and steadying her back down. She doesn’t have a gun to grab, wouldn’t grab one if she did, but Moran did get her a baton. She slides it out from underneath her bed, the weight familiar and comfortable.

She follows Moran as he walks slowly toward the hotel door. Joan slowly slides the baton out, carefully muffling the soft _snick_ sound in her shirt. Moran stops by the door, placing his hand lightly on the knob. She can see him mouthing a countdown in the dim light, and she readies herself.

Moran flings open the door when he reaches one, and Joan steps forward, ready to smack whoever is there. She was anticipating one person, maybe. Instead there are four or five. She hits the person closest to the door, who is wearing a ski mask. The person directly behind him raises a gun, and Joan grabs the door and slams it shut again, locking it, ducking down just at the gun goes off.

“It’s a hit team, go!” she yells and scrambles away from the door. She hears another shot and flings herself flat on the floor. She can feel the heat of the bullet fly over her head. Then she feels Moran grab the back of her shirt and haul her up.

“Vi, get the money!” he bellows as he shoves Joan ahead of him. He steers her toward the bed, and together they grab it, move it to block the path. She turns and sees Violet with the pack that holds the money flung over her shoulder. She’s holding Joan’s bag too, outstretched toward her. Joan grabs it even as Moran grabs the chair and flings it through the window. They never stay in a room higher than the second floor, and she’s never understood why. Now she does. 

Behind them, she hears the door splinter as someone kicks it in. Joan makes eye contact with Moran, and they snag the mattress off the last bed, pushing Violet to the side and out of the potential line of fire. Joan uses her baton to break the remaining glass out of the window, the shattering noise barely audible compared to sound of the door collapsing. “Hold on to me,” Joan says grimly. Violet wraps her arms around Joan’s waist, and the three of them force the mattress out the window, holding onto it as they fall down. She hears a bullet hit the window next to them even as they fall.

The mattress hits the ground hard, knocking the breath out of Joan. She gasps, but someone is pulling at her already. She forces herself upright, clutching her bag and running as fast as she can. Out of the corner of her eyes, she can see Moran running as well, holding his side, and Violet using her bag as a shield.

They run for a very long time. Joan doesn’t know where they are, or what part of the city they’re in, just that they need to run. The bullets eventually stop, but they don’t. Her chest hurts; she hasn’t jogged in so long, her body doesn’t have any muscle memory for it anymore. Whenever one of them flags, the other two pull them along for a while.

She thinks they must have run through the entire city by the time Moran begins to slow down. “I think we outran them,” he pants, and sags down against a low brick wall. Joan sits down next to him, Violet on his other side. 

“Is anyone hurt?” Joan asks.

Violet shakes her head, but Moran groans. “Not badly,” he says. “But something caught my side.”

“Okay,” she says. “We need to find someplace safe, I think, before I can look at it.”

“Is any place really safe?” Violet asks bitterly, but she’s standing up. She digs out some money, and hands the bag to Joan. “Keep that safe. I’ll go find us a place to stay.”

Joan nods, and sits up in a crouch, trying to see how badly Moran is hurt. Moran bats her hands away. “Cut it out,” he snaps. “Wait till we’re inside, at least.”

“How do you think they found us?” she asks quietly, settling back down next to him. 

“We must have gotten careless. Or we ran into someone who was specifically told to look for us. Hard to say.”

Joan closes her eyes and tries to think through their actions. She hasn’t been online since they reached Prague, nor touched a cell phone, so she doesn’t think it was an issue of accidentally turning on a GPS. They’d only just begun to look into Douglas Britch, the assassin they were there for. Only one day of surveillance.

“Do you think…” she says, hesitating, “Do you think Moriarty could have warned her assassins that we might be coming for them? Do you think she might have told Britch to watch for us?”

Moran grunts as he shifts on the ground. “It’s possible. Moriarty preferred to keep us all in the dark, but she might be getting nervous about how many people we’ve removed already.”

Joan sighs. “Not enough. Barely a drop in the bucket.”

“More than she’s lost before.”

She doesn’t say anything. She wonders if it’s possible that Moriarty is getting worried enough to warn her operatives. It would be a huge concession of power, if that were the case. Joan has trouble imagining Moriarty being willing to admit anything less than complete control.

“We need to find out,” she says. “If we don’t find out, we’ll risk making the same mistake.”

Moran doesn’t reply, just nods, his head resting against the wall.

Violet comes back about half an hour later. “I found a place for us. Come on.”

Joan helps maneuver Moran up, and they go.

******  
The place Violet found turns out to be the home of someone who appears to be on vacation. She looks proud of herself, explaining how she picked the lock to get in. Joan doesn’t have the heart to tell her why choosing an occupied house isn’t ideal. But they’ll only be there long enough to take a look at Moran, so she guesses it doesn’t matter much.

Joan has Violet close all the curtains as she instructs Moran to take off his shirt in the kitchen. She finds a washcloth in the bathroom and gets it wet. When she comes back out to the kitchen, Moran is standing shirtless, scowling at the smear of blood on his side.

She carefully wipes the blood away, steadying his muscles as they twitch away from her probing fingers. “Hold still,” she says.

“Hurry up. We need to get back to the hotel, if you want to find out who it was that attacked us.”

Violet, watching from the doorway, frowns. “We’re going back?”

Joan nods. “We need to know how they found us.” The wound seems small, and it’s a jagged tear. It doesn’t look like a bullet wound. When she encounters a sliver of wood lodged along his ribs, something undefinable in Joan relaxes. “It looks like some of the wood from the window hit you on our way out. It’s not a bullet wound.”

Moran sighs. “Well, that’s a relief. Last thing we needed was a bullet in the mix. Slap a bandage on it and let’s go.”

“We need to make sure it doesn’t get infected. Violet, can you check the bathroom and see if they have any peroxide, or some kind of antiseptic?”

“Sure,” Violet says, and runs out of the room.

Joan finishes wiping the blood away from Moran’s ribs and then uses the tweezers she took from the bathroom to pull out the few pieces of wood she finds in his side. “We got lucky.”

“Yeah.”

“Should we start sleeping in watches?” she asks.

Moran considers, taking the washcloth from Joan and holding it for her. “No, I don’t think so. Nobody gets enough sleep as it is.”

In her heart, she agrees. Logically, though, she isn’t sure. She decides not to pursue it further, not tonight. “I think the key is Britch. I think he’s involved in all of this.”

“You realize we’ll need a more direct approach, then?” Moran asks as Violet walks back in, handing a tube of Neosporin to Joan.

“We managed it with Slaney,” she says. “We’ll manage it again.”

“Ready to change your mind yet about our tactics?”

For a moment, a terrifying moment, Joan hesitates. She’s scared and cold, and she’s had a gun pointed and fired at her. They had to have run for miles. And it would be so much _easier_ if Joan would let Moran…

“No,” she says. She ignores the tremble in her voice. “Absolutely not. Now let’s work on finding a place to stay for tonight.”

“We can’t stay here?” Violet asks, but before Joan can say anything, she answers her own question. “No, of course not. A neighbor or something might see us. Okay, there’s a hotel a few blocks away. That should be okay.”

“I’ll go ahead and get us checked in,” Joan says. “Violet, help your brother?”

“Of course.”

Joan slides her bag over her shoulder and heads out the door, letting Violet point her in the right direction. She keeps to the shadows, listening intently to everything around her, and she thinks, for a very long time, about what it means for her to hesitate.

******  
They manage to get a few hours sleep, though Joan spends most of it awake, staring at the ceiling and twitching at the smallest noise. Violet’s snores are a comfort, though, and they eventually lull her into a restless sleep.

In the morning, Joan sends Violet on ahead to find them another place to stay, as off the grid as she can. She and Moran retreat to a dingy looking restaurant that has no cameras and huddle in a booth, hoodies up or hats on, trying to come up with a plan.

“I just don’t think she would reveal to her lieutenants any form of weakness, do you?” Joan asks. “Did she ever show you any hint that she didn’t have everything under complete control?”

Moran spins the spoon in his coffee mug. He drinks his coffee black, so the spoon is unnecessary, but he has antsy hands. “No,” he admits. “She sent short texts detailing my newest job, but she never said anything else.”

She nods. “So I don’t think she would have warned any of her people that we might be coming.”

They sit silently as a waitress sets down their dishes in front of them. Joan stares at the floor while Moran angles his head toward the wall. Once the waitress is gone, they look back at each other, starting to nibble at their food.

Joan eats her liquidy eggs, running over their movements over the past few months, trying to spot a gap in their security. It’s impossible, of course, to be completely safe. If it were, Joan would do all of this from one comfortable spot, back at the brownstone, her wall of crazy spread across her room and all of her favorite foods and people nearby. But she’s certain they’ve been as careful as they could be. They never go out with their faces completely exposed, using hoodies or ski masks or even scarves to conceal what they can. Both Joan and Violet have cut and dyed their hair, and they go through piles of makeup, altering the shape of their cheekbones, forehead, eyes, and lips. Moran has grown a beard in the past month- an unsettling sight- and at Joan’s insistence, started wearing thick soled boots that raise him up by a few inches. They wear multiple layers at all times, adjusting the shapes of their bodies.

No, Joan doesn’t think it’s possible that any sort of computer recognition program spotted them. And many of the things they’ve done to alter themselves mean that even someone specifically looking for them would have trouble spotting them immediately. She hasn’t noticed anyone following them, and they never stay in the same place long enough to grow comfortable. All the money they have is spread out through Europe, and whenever they make withdrawal from a bank they leave the country the same day.

Logging onto the Internet is always done through multiple proxy servers, or on a public network far from where they’re staying. The phones they use for calls are all basic models, with no GPS installed. The smart phones they pick up from time to time always have the GPS immediately disconnected, and they discard them after a few uses.

She’s missing something. She thinks it’s probably obvious.

She’s almost done with her toast when it occurs to her. She looks up at Moran, who is scrapping the edges of his bowl of oatmeal. “What if she didn’t warn her people we were coming for them. What if she made us their targets, instead?”

Moran pauses, and then sets his bowl aside. “Makes sense,” he says. “Wouldn’t surprise me if she guessed we would be going after her assassins.”

Joan doesn’t think Moriarty does much _guessing_ , but she doesn’t say anything. She frowns. “If she thought we were coming after her assassins, why wouldn’t she be here to meet us?”

He shrugs, and snags her last piece of toast from her plate. She scowls at him. “Maybe she has better things to do?”

Something about that niggles at the back of her brain, but she can’t quite place her finger on why that matters. She tosses the thought aside and returns to her original idea. “She might not have figured out that we were targeting assassins, though. We might be their assignment. Maybe it’s the other way around- maybe _they’re_ targeting _us_.”

“You don’t think Britch might find it suspicious that we just so happen to show up in the same country he’s in, the same one he’s been in for a few months?”

“Yeah… he would. It didn’t take much to make you suspicious, back in New York.”

Moran catches on to her train of thought and raises his eyebrows slowly, letting out a low whistle. “I had a bone to pick with Moriarty, Watson. I don’t know if you’ll be able to manage the same trick twice.”

She agrees. “I don’t think I can either. Which is why we won’t try the same trick.”

******  
It’s a balancing act, hunting their hunter, but they have an advantage: they know the full story. From what Moran has told her, Moriarty never tells her assassins details about their targets, beyond basic details in order to help them complete their job. She never tells them why their target is a target.

But Joan knows why they are, and she knows Britch is hunting them. 

Violet trades off with Joan and Moran, acting as bait. Moran shaves so he looks like the probable description Moriarty gave, and Joan and Violet dye their hair again, back to their natural colors, putting in hair extensions to restore length. It’s exhausting, but necessary. When Violet goes out alone, Joan and Moran follow, watching Britch watch Violet. Then they trade, and Moran forces her around the city, making her pick locks and act as a distraction while he steals things, and Violet watches Britch watch them.

It isn’t at all different from some of their usual routines- they keep their hoods up and scarves around their lower jaw, and they avoid cameras. And the three of them are almost never out together. It’s routine enough that, if Britch has any information about their comings and goings since Moran and Joan slipped Moriarty’s leash, it won’t look odd.

“He always stops watching us at 6pm, have you noticed?” Violet asks, pointing with her chopsticks at the pile of photos they’re spreading out into a timeline of the last two weeks. “And then he’s back by 8pm.”

“Even assassins have to eat,” Moran points out.

“He never goes to a restaurant, though, and there aren’t any room service charges from around that time, are there?” Joan asks, and goes digging through a separate pile, setting her Chinese aside.

The blinds are drawn and the lights are off. They’re sitting on the floor between beds, a chair jammed underneath the handle of the room. Moran has a small flashlight that he’s using to illuminate whatever they need to look at, trading it over to Joan whenever he wants to eat his food. They’ll be out of this hotel in a matter of hours, finding another place to spend the night. In the meantime, it works well as a base of operations.

“No,” Violet says, handing her the stack. “He orders his room service before he leaves in the morning, and then when he gets back in at night, sometime between 10pm and midnight.”

“Why hasn’t he attacked again?” Moran wonders, sifting through the photos and pointing at each one where Britch is just taking photos or watching them. “If I were him, I would have moved while we were still shaken from his initial attack. Easier, quicker. Why all this surveillance?”

It’s a good question. “I think he’s doing exactly what we want him to do- wonder why his target just so happened to land, giftwrapped, in his lap. You always had to travel for your targets, right?”

Moran nods. “I never stayed in the same city for long. Never had my name on the lease, nothing.”

“Right. But we know Britch has been here for close to three years, doing some sort of long term project.”

Joan can see Violet’s mouth twist into a confused frown in the shadows of the flashlight. “Isn’t it possible Moriarty would assign us to Britch _because_ we’re in the same city?”

Joan and Moriarty shake their heads in unison. “There is no way Moriarty could say definitively we were here,” Joan says. “Unless she knew we were targeting assassins. And she wouldn’t have told Britch that.”

“He would have had more general instructions. It could have worried him, having his target show up in his city before he had time to move,” says Moran.

“I need to get his phone,” Joan decides. “We’ll have a better idea of how suspicious he might be if I can see what Moriarty sent him.”

“How are we going to do that?” Violet asks.

Joan looks at Moran. “Think you can find some guns?”

Moran gives her a broad, unsettling smile. “Of course, love. Not a problem in the slightest.”

******  
They take advantage of Britch’s mysterious 6pm break. He goes back to his hotel room every time, so they know where to find him. Two days after their discussion, Joan and Violet take a circuitous route to his hotel after he abandons his surveillance, careful that they aren’t followed. 

When they’re in position, Joan calls Moran. “Are you ready?” she asks.

“Absolutely. Let’s get this taken care of.”

“The goal is to scare him, Moran. No-”

“Yeah, yeah, we’re all do-gooders here. Let’s go, Watson.”

“Okay. We’re ready. In three, two…”

Joan can hear, from her side of the hotel door, the sound of glass shattering. The sniper rifle is nearly silent, so she doesn’t hear the retort, but she hears Britch bellow. A moment later, she hears a vase shatter, and then something else break. Not even a second passes before Britch throws open the hotel door, running directly into Violet, who throws him to the ground. Joan raises her baton above her head and brings it down over him, knocking him unconscious with one swift blow.

“Watch him,” Joan says, tossing her some zip ties, and then goes into the hotel room. “I’m in,” she tells Moran on the phone.

“You have maybe five minutes before the police show up. Make it quick.”

The room is kept neat, almost militarily so. Joan wonders if Britch, too, has a background like Moran’s. The television is on, and she pauses. It’s a show from the States, something Joan vaguely recognizes as a popular show, about a quirky mother and a quirky daughter and their quirky life. “This is what he takes a break for every day?” she mutters, and then turns her focus to the rest of the room.

Neat, yes, but not as neat as she originally thought. The trash can is full, too full, with only partially shredded documents. She considers pulling them out, but decides she shouldn’t- they want to scare Britch and leave him unbalanced. Taking things would give him a clue to follow. 

There is food piled up on the desk, but the clothes in the dresser are folded perfectly, with crisp lines. The sheets on the bed are a mess. Joan pauses over his equipment case, but leaves it, and walks over to the table, where his phone is charging.

Pulling gloves on, she memorizes the exact angle and position of the phone. She checks for strands of hair or fishing line that might be placed on it, a cheap way to find out if someone has tampering with things, and once she sees there isn’t anything like that, she picks it up.

The phone is locked, as she thought, but Joan read through Slaney’s file on Britch thoroughly. While she suspects that Slaney has, by now, issued new lock codes to every lieutenant in Moriarty’s network, there’s no reason to assume he didn’t keep it along the same lines. He doesn’t have time for art anymore, after all; he only has time for what is cheap and fast. It takes two tries, but Joan gets in.

The text messages are also encoded, and it isn’t the exact code in his file, but just like Joan thought, it’s the same category of cipher assigned to assassins. She uses her own phone to take a picture of every text he has. There’s no time to decode on the spot. Thankfully, there are only about forty or fifty texts- he’s a man who cleans out his inbox fairly regularly.

She closes out the text messenger and starts to put the phone back down, but hesitates. There’s a personalized background on the phone, not a stock image like she would have expected. It’s generic looking, enough that it probably wouldn’t catch most people’s eye, but it catches hers. It looks like a badly off-frame photo of a house, and at the very edge, Joan thinks she can see the edge of a sleeve. A child’s sleeve, maybe.

“Watson, the police are one street a way,” Moran says.

“One more minute,” she says. She stares at the photo, wondering if Britch has a family. If he _had_ a family- the quality of the photo suggests that it’s a scan of an older photo.

“You don’t have a minute. Thirty seconds.”

She snaps out of her reverie and places the phone back in the exact place she found it. Then she pulls a piece of paper out of her pocket, as well as a Swiss army knife, and stabs the paper down into the pillow.

“Watson!”

“I’m going!” she says, and runs out of the hotel room, closing it behind her. Violet stoops down, cutting Britch’s bonds, and they hurry down the back stairwell and out of the hotel.

******  
“I think I have an idea of how we might turn him,” Joan announces once they’ve regrouped on the other side of the city. 

Moran, carefully cleaning his rifle, looks up. “Yeah?”

Joan settles down in a booth. They’re in an empty restaurant, one that looks like it closed its doors months ago, judging from the dirt and debris around them. It’s disgusting, but Violet chose it because the windows were blacked out, not because it was clean. “I’m not certain yet, it could absolutely be nothing. But Moriarty tends to use families against people, have you noticed? She used my mother against me, back when we first met. And of course she’s using them now, as part of our deal. And you and Violet. Moriarty targets family members in order to keep her people in line.”

She stands back up, agitated. Moriarty’s patterns are obvious- targeting family members, sequestering people and making their loved ones think they’re dead- but Joan still doesn’t know what it actually means. She comes back to it over and over, just like the puzzle of Godfrey Norton. All of them mean something for Moriarty, and they mean something so big that she keeps the secret carefully guarded.

“What’s all that have to do with Britch?” Moran asks.

“He had a photo, on the background of his phone. It looked like it was a scan of a really old, well-worn photo- you could see crease lines from where it had been folded, over and over again, and it was grainy, kind of like you see in older photos? He’d clearly done a lot to hide any identifying information in the photo, it was cropped in a strange way, but I could just see the sleeve of what looked like a child.”

Violet, sitting on top of a table, looks unimpressed. “So?”

“So it was an old photo. If those people were still around, or part of his life, why wouldn’t he have updated it to a newer one?”

“Maybe it has sentimental value. Lots of people carry their adult kids baby pictures in their wallet, Joan,” Violet points out.

“Yes, but usually not _just_ their baby pictures. There’s usually some from older, too. But that was all there was. His phone was empty otherwise.”

Moran grunts as he begins putting his rifle away again. “Seems like a stretch. You think Moriarty has them, or is threatening them?”

“I think they might be dead,” Joan says bluntly. “The photo is so old. It’s a soldier’s memento, not the talisman of a hired killer.”

“So we need to find records, right?” Violet asks. “That’s what we need. We need to find Britch’s family.”

Joan nods. “And once we find them, we need to find out exactly what happened to them.”

******  
It’s a risk, but they leave Prague.

“This is his territory. As long as we’re here, we don’t have as strong of an advantage,” Moran insists. “If we leave, Britch will follow- he has to, we’re his job. It’ll take him time to find us again, which might be enough time for you to find his family.”

Joan agrees with his assessment, and so they head south to Sarajevo. There they set up camp in an abandoned house, in a neighborhood full of abandoned houses. And there Joan and Violet sit together, working to find out what happened to Britch’s family.

The first step isn’t terribly difficult. The deaths of Emily and Eileen Britch were all over the newspapers in Scotland, where Douglas Britch was originally from. Violet blinks back some tears when she sees the name Eileen, and Joan knows she’s thinking about her aunt. Tentatively, Joan takes her hand. Violet squeezes, then lets go, focusing on the work at hand.

“They passed it off as a car accident,” Violet says, turning her computer screen so that Joan can see it. “But doesn’t it seem familiar? The details, I mean?”

Joan pulls Violet’s computer closer and reads through the story. Fatal brake error, a recall that hadn’t been announced, a car through a telephone pole- Violet’s right.

“So Karl Larsen killed Douglas Britch’s family,” Joan says.

“Looks that way,” Violet says. Moran comes over, putting aside the guns he was cleaning, and takes a look at the screen.

“It definitely has all the marks of Larsen,” he finally agrees.

Joan nods. “All right. Now we just need to prove it. And quick.”

******  
Moran refuses to help with any of their research, but he goes out of the house they’re squatting in every day to look for Britch. They figure that it won’t take him more than a day or two to find them, especially since they left some miniscule bread crumbs to follow, if someone looked hard enough. Joan doesn’t think he’ll miss them; Moriarty wouldn’t keep an assassin on her payroll that didn’t look hard enough. 

So it becomes a bit of a waiting game, and a bit of a race, as Joan tries to get all the proof she’ll need to convince Britch. She pulls police reports and witness statements, mechanic reports, and evidence of Larsen’s other murders. Perhaps most damningly, in her eyes, she finds record of the bankruptcy and subsequent purchase of the brakes manufacturer who made the brakes of the Britch’s car. The outcry about the Britch family death had been something the small company hadn’t been able to push through, and they were eventually absorbed by a weapons manufacturer, one that Joan knows Moriarty has a hand in. 

She puts it all in an easy-to-carry flash drive, and waits for word from Moran. It doesn’t take long, just as she thought. Four days after they arrived in Sarajevo, Moran comes back to the house after a long day out and says, “He’s here.”

******  
“I don’t like this plan,” Moran says.

Joan rolls her eyes. He’s said that fifteen times in the past fifteen minutes. “You were fine with it a week ago.”

“You didn’t tell me the specifics. This is a bad plan, Watson.”

“I have all the evidence,” Joan argues, waving the flash drive at him. “He still grieves for his family, Moran. He still loves them. If I can show him that the woman he works for is the one who ordered their deaths, he won’t want to work for her anymore.”

Moran folds his arms across his chest. “On that, we agree. I don’t like the idea of you being the one to go in, though. Why not me? Why not Vi? If something goes sideways, at least you aren’t implicated.”

She sighs and ties her hair back, looking at Violet. “Tell your brother to cut it out.”

To her surprise, Violet bites her lip and shakes her head slowly. “He has a point, Joan. You going in there alone- it isn’t a good plan.”

“You both will be just down the hall. If something happens, you’ll be there to stop it.”

“What if he shoots first, Watson? Then you’re dead, and Vi and I are without the brains of the operation. Then our revenge is shot to hell. Neither of us is going to learn your code rubbish.”

Joan sits down on the edge of the bed. She’s dressed all in black, her hair is up, her shoes are tied, and she has the flash drive. She’s ready to go. She doesn’t want to sit here and argue about this anymore. “It has to be me,” she says. “You know that, Moran. I’m the one who has to convince him. I’m the only one who could. Britch might not know all the details about me, but he knows I was involved with Moriarty’s trial, at the very least. He’ll know that I have the information, and ability, to bring Moriarty down.”

Moran shakes his head, but she sees the moment he gives in, his shoulders slumping. “Fine. At least take a gun.”

“I-”

“Joan,” Moran says, voice firm and serious. “Take the damn gun.”

She looks up at him. His eyes are dark, the very corners of his mouth turned just slightly downward, enough to pull lines in his face. “All right,” she says. “All right, I’ll take a gun.”

Moran immediately pulls one out of his holster and hands it to her. It sits heavy in her hand. She looks at it. It’s a Browning, Moran’s preferred kind of gun. “You remember how it works?” he asks.

She resists rolling her eyes again, barely. Moran trained her on guns relentlessly, despite Joan’s unwillingness to use them. “It’s a single-action semiautomatic pistol,” she recites mechanically. “It has to be cocked first each time you shoot it.”

“Right. Remember that. This goes south, you can’t lose time by fumbling around with it.”

“I got it, Moran.”

Joan stands and tucks the gun into the waistband of her pants, against her back. She sees Moran wince, but she doesn’t really have an option; Moran only has holsters that fit him, she’s pretty sure. He’ll have to live with her lack of gun safety.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s get this over with.”

******  
Moran had scouted out where Britch was staying, and much like they usually do, he’s staying in a cheap, run down motel. It would be amusing, Joan thinks, that they have such similar needs- ability to pay in cash, using an obvious pseudonym, with almost no cameras around to track movement- if they weren’t in such different circumstances. They’re running for their lives; Britch and all of Moriarty’s other lieutenants are working a job.

Moran slips the guy working the front desk a wad of cash, and he dutifully turns away. Joan focuses on keeping her breathing steady. As much as she argued with Moran, she knows this isn’t the safest of plans. But when she counts up the days, weeks, months that she’s lost to Moriarty, all she can focus on is getting this over with _now_. She can’t spend the rest of her life taking apart Moriarty’s network. She just can’t.

The hallways are silent, the motel at barely a quarter occupancy. It’s ideal for their purposes. No one will be around to overhear their conversation, and no one will raise an eyebrow at Violet and Moran skulking in the hallways. Joan puts one foot in front of the other, glancing at room numbers. She needs room 149.

She’s standing in front of it too soon. She halts, staring at the numbers, the brass in need of polishing. Looking a little closer, she realizes it’s a case of the paint needing to be refreshed, not brass. This really is a cheap motel.

“Ready?” Moran asks quietly. Violet, standing behind him, looks visibly worried. Joan gives her a reassuring smile, wishing it worked on herself, and then nods at Moran.

“Ready. I’ll shout if something goes wrong.”

He nods back, and then takes Violet by the elbow, steering her further down the hall. Violet looks over her shoulder at Joan, her forehead scrunched. “Be careful,” she mouths. Joan smiles again, and then drops to a crouch in front of the door, pulling her lockpicks from her hoodie pouch.

The locks are as cheap as everything else in the motel, and they give way with barely any effort. Joan eases the door open, looking for a wire or a string, anything indicating that Britch set up a trap. Nothing in Prague suggested that was his style, but then, that was before they broke into his room and terrorized him.

To her relief, there’s nothing. Slowly, she eases the door open and slips in, still in a crouch. She closes the door, careful to avoid making any noise. The room is dark, and she thinks she can hear Britch breathing. Slow, even. The breath of a man asleep. She releases the breath she’s been holding and crawls forward, keeping low.

Joan reaches the foot of the bed, a sense of relief in her heart. Nothing bad so far. Carefully, she slowly stands up.

Britch sits up at the same time, leveling a gun at her.

Adrenaline spikes through her gut, but Joan manages to keep her voice calm, saying, “Let’s talk first.”

“You’re Joan Watson,” Britch says. He must have been faking sleep, she thinks, and it takes someone very experienced at it to keep their breath that even. Joan knows; she always got caught when she was faking sleep.

“I am,” she says, and looks at the gun. It’s a Glock. She thinks of Moran’s sneering distaste for Glocks, remembering his complaint about them not being nearly as efficient as other weapons. He only let her train on a Glock once, explaining that the hand strength needed to make them good weapons was probably going to be beyond her. She’d bristled at the implication, but after firing it once, she had to agree.

She needs to stop focusing on the gun, even if it is leveled at her head. She wonders if Britch is good enough to go for a double tap with a Glock. He’s one of Moriarty’s assassins; of course he is.

“You know, Moriarty thinks you’re an unwilling prisoner of Moran,” he says conversationally, and tosses the bed clothes to the side. He’s fully dressed, she realizes. He was waiting for them. “Yet here you are, without your handler.”

“Moriarty isn’t nearly as omniscient as she thinks she is, haven’t you noticed?” Joan says.

Britch snorts. “You’re the one at the wrong end of my gun.”

“I’m the one who knows what happened to your family,” she says.

Britch visibly pauses, his hand going slack for a brief moment before returning to its position. He raises an eyebrow. “You know about my family?”

Joan lowers her hands, which she’d instinctively raised when Britch first sat up. She takes a step closer to the bed. “You never wondered about that car accident? Didn’t it all seem a little coincidental to you?”

“The brakes failed,” he says.

“How soon after they died did Moriarty approach you?” she asks. “Or had she already approached you and you refused? She likes to hurt families, Britch. Did you ever suspect her?”

“Moriarty had nothing to do with my family’s death,” Britch says, his voice rough.

Joan reaches into her hoodie. Britch shakes the gun at her, but she holds up a placating hand. “I’m just pulling out a flash drive. You’ll want to see this. Emily and Eileen- you deserve to know the truth.” When he doesn’t move any further, Joan pulls out the flash drive. She holds it up, showing it to Britch. “You know I was a detective, before Moriarty took me. You know I was good at my job, right? Well, I found it all, Britch. All the evidence points to Moriarty killing your family. Do you want to see?”

Britch stares at her, his eyes unreadable, but he nods. He points at a laptop on the motel desk. “Go ahead.”

There’s something odd about his body language, but Joan ignores it. She’s his target, offering evidence of his family’s murder. She thinks her body language would be weird, too, in a circumstance like this. She opens up the laptop, starting it up and plugging the flash drive into the side. She starts clicking on files, bringing them up. “Moriarty had an assassin, arrested about a month ago, named Karl Larsen. Larsen specialized in killing people using vehicles, making it seem like an accident. If you look here, the brakes failure that killed your family? It’s similar to the ones he used to kill four other people across Europe and the United States. And look here, Britch- the company that made those brakes ended up being acquired by this company, which makes weapons. Moriarty has her hand in this company. It all ties back to Moriarty.”

Abruptly, she feels Britch press against her back. “It all does,” he says, low in her ear, and she feels his hand dip into her waistband, pulling out her gun. “Of course, you have it all wrong.”

Her arms go cold. Her cheeks feel hot. “What?” she asks, startled at how calm her voice is.

“Moriarty made me an offer, you’re right. But it had conditions. She couldn’t have a family man on her payroll. Turn around, Ms. Watson.”

Joan turns slowly. Her legs are spaghetti, tremors running up them. This isn’t right. This isn’t what she planned on. The space where the gun was feels exposed, strangely bare even though she’d only had the gun for less than an hour. Britch is pointing both guns, though loosely, more toward her legs. He’s only a foot or two from her. His shoulders are relaxed, and he’s smiling. 

_This isn’t right_ , Joan thinks to herself. _This isn’t how I planned it._

“Moriarty doesn’t allow people with families in her organization. She doesn’t much care how they go, but they have to go,” Britch says.

“That’s not true,” she says. “Moran has a sister, and he worked for her.”

Britch laughs. “Moran was a traitor from the beginning, just no one knew it. It worked out for Moriarty, though; I think she’s loosened up on that rule since she realized that she could blackmail Moran with his sister.”

“So you arranged for your family to die?” she asks, her voice cracking. She can feel her heart in her ears.

Britch laughs again, and leans close. “I killed them,” he whispers, as if it’s a secret between two friends. “Moriarty told me how to do it, but I killed them.”

“The photo on your phone…”

“Loved that house. Hated giving it up, but it had to go.” Britch sighs and shakes his head. “Oh well. Now, Ms. Watson, Moriarty wanted you alive, but given what you’ve shown me today, I don’t think she’ll mind much if I bring her your head instead.” He leans back again and puts his finger on the trigger of his gun.

Guns, Joan remembers Moran telling her, are not close-range weapons. The closer a person is standing to you with a gun, the bigger disadvantage they have. He’d leveled a gun at her in China, while they waited for yet another train, and talked her through all the ways to turn their disadvantage into her advantage.

She steps forward quickly, right up against Britch, shoving aside the guns as hard as she can. Her right hand slams hard into one, and she’s pretty sure a bone cracks given the pain that shoots up her arm, but the gun goes skittering down and across the floor. Britch keeps his hold on the other one.

“You little-”

She ignores him, and grabs onto his wrist, keeping the gun pointed away from her. She jabs at his eyes, his throat, kicks at his legs, anything to keep him off balance. He’s stronger than her, though, and taller, and she doesn’t hit anything vital. He twists, turning the gun back toward her. She pushes against him, sliding a leg between his and locking her ankle behind his own. They topple over, down to the ground.

She needs to scream. She needs to scream and get Moran and Violet in the room.

Britch grunts as he hits the ground, Joan landing on top of him. His remaining gun skitters across the floor, underneath the bed. She scrambles over him, trying to use her knee to pin his arm, something, anything to keep him down. There is a buzz in her ears, and she can see Britch moving his mouth, but she can’t hear him anymore. There are pinpricks in her eyes, darkness in the corner of her vision.

She doesn’t get as far as she’d like. Britch surges up, wrapping his arms around her. Joan squeaks, but she still can’t get the scream out. Underneath her, Britch contorts, and suddenly she’s underneath him.

His eyes are wild, his mouth a thick scowl. He leans down, his bulk pinning her even as she tries to use her hips to throw him off. “I prefer the up close and personal way anyway, Ms. Watson,” he whispers in her ear, and he lets go of her. For a moment, Joan thinks she has a chance, but then his hands are on her again, this time wrapping around her neck.

There is an ocean in her ears now, and as he presses around her neck, the darkness in the corners of her vision gets darker, beginning to swim into the center. Joan stares up at him, trying to pull his hands away with her right hand, inexplicably left free. It doesn’t work, though she didn’t really think it would. She tries her hips again, lifting trying to roll to the side and swing her shoulder and free hand up into him, but he doesn’t budge.

Next to Britch, Joan can see the edge of her gun. It must have been his Glock that went underneath the bed, she finds herself thinking vaguely. She can’t catch her breath. Britch has her left hand pinned underneath his knee, so she can’t reach the gun. She doesn’t even know if she can shoot with her left hand. Moran didn’t cover that. 

She can’t breathe. She remembers looking at choking victims in the ER, their windpipes crushed as she pronounced them dead on arrival. She remembers standing at crime scenes, Marcus next to her, shaking his head at another dead woman, a necklace of bruises stark against her skin. She remembers standing in morgues, listening to a coroner explain how, exactly, a choking victim died.

Panic floods her body, and she slams her hips up, rolling with all her might towards her trapped hand. Her free hand, rather than hitting Britch’s elbows like she was taught, smacks him solidly in the ear. It must startle him, because Britch’s knees slip and one hand lets go to catch himself. Joan sucks in a quick gasp of air and grabs frantically for the gun. She can see the dead women in her mind, and when she touches the gun, she doesn’t hesitate.

Joan thumbs back the hammer, presses it against Britch’s thigh, and fires.

Britch’s hands slacken, and she uses her hips one more time, managing to roll Britch off of her. His eyes are wide, stunned, and he reaches downward, grabbing at his leg. Joan stares at him, coughing and holding her throat, trying to catch her breath. She watches as a puddle of blood forms underneath his leg. His jeans are soaked, she realizes. Not the way they would be if she just clipped him. She’s seen that before. It’s an arterial bleed.

“No,” she manages to say, and rolls onto her hands and knees, crawling towards him. She reaches out her hand, but he bats her away. “I’m helping,” she says. “I need to stop the bleeding.” Every word is fire on her throat, but she needs him to understand. She can save him, she can stop the bleeding. There are ways, with arterial bleeds, she can save him.

She’s just managed to get a hand on his ankle, still coughing, when the door bursts open and Moran and Violet rush in. “What happened?” Moran demands. He runs over, pulling Joan up and away from her patient. “Are you hurt?”

Joan shakes her head, reaching toward Britch. “Need to help him,” she croaks out, and coughs again.

Moran glances down at Britch, and then looks at Violet. “Wipe the gun down,” he tells her. “Get a towel and wipe everything you can down. And get the flash drive. Bring the towel with you. Two minutes.”

Violet nods sharply and hurries away. Joan stares at Britch. He doesn’t seem to see her anymore. He’s not even going for his own gun.

Moran starts pushing her towards the door. “No,” she says, trying to pull away from him. “I can help.”

“He’s a dead man, Watson,” he says. “You got his femoral.”

There are ways, she wants to explain. She was a surgeon, she wants to say. She stretches out her hands. They have blood on them.

“We have to go,” he says, and he’s stronger than her, just like Britch was, and he gets her to the door, out the door, down the hall, out a back door, and all down the streets until he finally, finally hails a cab to take them back to the house they’re staying in.

******  
By the time they get back, Joan’s shivering. Moran continues to steer her, leading her into the bedroom she’s been sleeping in. He pushes her down onto the bed, swinging her legs up onto it. He unlaces her shoes and pulls them off, chucking them over by the door. Then he grabs a blanket from the foot of the bed, covers her with it, and walks out. 

Joan can’t stop looking at her hands. She doesn’t know how she got blood on them. She didn’t think Britch let her touch him. She remembers reaching his ankle, being able to touch his ankle. But the blood had pooled by that point, she realizes. Britch was an island in his own blood. She must have put her hands in the pool.

She could have saved him. She could have. This one, she knows could have saved.

Moran comes back into the room, holding a bowl. He sets it down on a nightstand, sitting down on the edge of the bed next to her. He pulls a washcloth out of the bowl. It’s wet. Joan stares at it.

“We’ve got to get you cleaned up, Watson,” he explains, and then takes her hand in his, carefully wiping away the blood.

She watches him. “I killed him,” she says eventually.

“You did.” It’s blunt, matter-of-fact, but oddly… gentle, almost. For Moran.

“I thought you’d be gloating,” Joan says, aware of how bitter she sounds. “That I finally gave in and killed someone. Did what you wanted me to do all along.”

Moran finishes with her hands and sets them down on her lap again. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll gloat,” he says roughly, standing up. “But not tonight.”

When he leaves, Joan finds herself unable to cry.


	4. 4

******  
Moran hustles them out of the city the next day. Joan doesn’t question it, just lets herself be pulled and pushed and tugged and pointed. Her legs feel heavy, but she can’t feel her hands. She holds her bags closer than usual, convinced she’ll drop them since she can’t feel her hands. She doesn’t ask where they’re going. She doesn’t need to know.

At one point, on a train, Violet grabs her hand and holds it. Joan only knows because she feels her arm move. She looks at their entwined fingers and doesn’t say anything. Her throat hurts, and there are bruises around her neck. She’s wearing a hoodie, with the hood up, but she wrapped a scarf around her throat too. She doesn’t want people to stare. She can’t handle eyes on her right now.

She keeps seeing Britch in the corner of her eye, but whenever she looks over, he isn’t actually there. Moran won’t let her see a newspaper. She knows what that means. If Britch were alive, Moran might not tell her, but Violet would, at least. Violet understands better that this isn’t what she wanted.

Joan goes over everything in her head while they travel. She was so certain that the photo meant he had loved his family. She never thought that it could mean a _house_. Why would anyone carry around a picture of a house? How could she have made a mistake? She is a good detective, she doesn’t doubt that. Joan has always felt confident in her skills, certain that she trained with the best, certain that she used the skills and tools correctly. How could she have looked at that photo and gotten it _wrong?_

How could she have killed someone?

When she runs out of questions, she goes back to the beginning and starts all over again.

******  
At some point, Joan realizes they’re in St. Petersburg. She's staring out a window when she realizes, dimly, that she's looking at the Kazan Cathedral. She doesn't know how long she's been staring at it, or even how long she's been sitting by the window. Her eyes feel fuzzy, and her mouth tastes stale. She's wearing different clothes than the last time she can recall.

Her hands tingle, but she can feel them.

Slowly, Joan forces herself to blink, the Kazan Cathedral disappearing briefly. She lets herself blink again, and tries to sink back into her body. She's hungry, and her back aches. So does her throat. Her skin feels dry. Those are all things she can fix, so she stands up and turns towards the rest of the room.

It's a much nicer hotel than she's used to staying in at this point. The beds look plush, and probably even comfortable, and there is a quality television sitting on a nice, dark stand. Moran is laying on one bed, flipping through a newspaper, and Violet is on the other, Joan's laptop balanced on her knees.

"I'm hungry," Joan says. Her voice rasps unpleasantly, and stings, but it is recognizably her voice.

Violet startles, reaching to grab the laptop quickly before it can tumble down onto the mattress, but Moran simply grunts. "About time," he says, and snaps the newspaper shut.

"How long...?" she can't find the words for her question. How long was she stupefied, how long since she last ate, how long since she last killed a man? They're all of her questions, and none of them.

Thankfully, Moran fills in the gaps. "We've been in this hotel for a little under a week. Four days."

"I don't remember getting here," she admits.

"You had a few bad days," Violet says, moving the laptop down to the foot of the bed.

She almost wants to laugh at that succinct and inadequate description, but the actual physical urge never comes. Joan forces out a laugh anyway, even though it hurts. She needs them to know she's all right. They aren't done yet, and they need her, so she needs to be all right.

"I'm sorry," she says.

Moran stands up, stretching, his back popping loudly. "Don't worry about it. You did better than I did, under similar circumstances. I'll see about food. Vi had an idea on what next."

Joan looks back at Violet. "Can it wait until I've had a shower? I don't think I've had one for a while."

"A few days ago, but sure. It can wait."

Joan takes her time in the shower, rubbing her hands over every part of herself, letting herself feel the soap and her own fingers. The water is hot, better than every hotel they've stayed in so far, and while she thinks she should be worried about staying at such a nice hotel for four long days, she also can't make herself care. She keeps turning the water heat up until it's too much to bear, and then she wraps herself in a robe, the terrycloth chafing against her sensitive skin. She removes the extensions in her hair; she won’t need them anymore, now that an assassin isn’t hunting them. She misses when it was long, though at least it’s black again, and leaves it slicked back against her skull. Then she goes back into the main room and sits down across from Violet.

"What do you have?" she asks. Her voice is properly commanding, she thinks, and Violet snaps to work.

"You've always been really busy with whomever we're going after that you haven't had much time to look at the rest of the files on this computer," Violet says, pulling the laptop back over and clicking a few buttons. "But these past few days, I figured it wouldn't hurt to dig through most of them and set about decoding them, so that when we were ready to work again, we'd know what to do. And I found something interesting. Here."

Violet turns the computer towards Joan, and she leans over. The file that is open has already been decoded using, she's surprised to see, the accountant’s cipher.

"An accountant?" she asks skeptically. While she's always known that accountants would have valuable information, since they likely manage Moriarty's money, she's never viewed them as so much of a threat that they would need to be eliminated immediately.

Violet must see what she's thinking, because she shakes her head quickly. "It's not because I think she's dangerous, per se. Just look at the file. I could be wrong, but I don't think I am."

Joan raises her eyebrow, but does as asked. If they made sure she got through the past few days, the least she can do is look at the file.

It doesn't take her long to determine that it _is_ unusual. Most of the files that Slaney had were basic dossiers, with things such as name, aliases, a photo, dates of birth, a quick history, things of that nature. All the files also contained a running list of dates, most of which Joan was able to link to crimes. The dossiers were never particularly in depth, but they provided a good snapshot of who they were up against, and they usually had a last known location.

This one is curiously empty.

The name is there- Honor Kensington- and the photo (a blurry candid, but Joan can make out that she's a slim brunette, white, somewhat tall), but most of the other information is left blank, with the exception of a single alias. Most of Moriarty's lieutenants have at least five or six; some have as many as fourteen. Only one alias is an anomaly.

It might be nothing, of course. If that were the only oddity, Joan would let it go; perhaps Honor Kensington is a terrible actor and can't be trusted to maintain more than one alias. Joan's been told many times that she herself is a bad liar, and should stick to playing herself and let others do the playacting. If it were just that, Joan would close the laptop. But then there is Honor's history. 

Which is blank.

The history simply says UNKNOWN. There are no dates at the bottom for Joan to match to crimes. There are no scans of newspaper ads used to communicate messages, or screencaps of text conversations, or Slaney's notations on changes and adjustments to their code. There's just a lot of nothing. A name, a single alias, and a blurry photo is all Honor Kensington is when it comes to Moriarty's organization.

Slaney's files, as best as Joan has been able to determine over the past year, are his alone. They aren't actual personnel files, nothing that Moriarty rifles through like some demented HR person. They're his notes on a person so he could best create individual codes. Dates of birth for keys, photos so he could meet them easily for the first time, histories in order to best tailor new information or leverage blackmail in a pinch. Joan would never call Slaney Moriarty's second-in-command, but she would certainly wager that Slaney is the only one in the organization, including Moriarty herself, that has _met_ every single person in the organization. This file hints that he never met Honor Kensington, even though he wrote a code for her.

"Are the other accountants like this?" Joan asks Violet.

Violet shakes her head, her hair falling in her eyes. She impatiently moves it away, tucking it behind her ears. "No. The other accountants-she has five or six, I think-all have a more standard file. No dates, like this one, but histories and aliases. Better photos, too."

"Strange..." Joan murmurs, and turns her attention back to the file. "Did you look to see if this file is just hiding another one?"

"It's not. This is literally all he has on her."

She considers. One on the one hand, lack of information could just indicate that Kensington is new to the organization, perhaps so new she hadn't even received her code yet. But the file is old- dating back to 2009- so Joan doubts it. It could also indicate that Kensington is dangerous or disgraced in some way. But that feels wrong, too. Moran's file had been kept up to date despite his status with Moriarty.

"You think she should be next?" asks Joan.

"Yeah," Violet says. "It might be nothing, which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, after... after the last week. Or it could be something important, and we'll be closer to being done with this."

Joan looks at the blurry picture. "All right," she says.

There is one last bit of information that is complete in Kensington's file, and it's the last known location. Joan's stomach tightens as she looks at it, but she knows Violet is right. Kensington could be nothing, but she could be something very, very important. So it looks like they'll be going back to London, CCTV capitol of the world.

******  
Moran is not happy to be going back to London, but he arranges everything, and so they’re back in the city within the next week. Joan spends the interim trying to find anything she can on Honor Kensington, but comes up empty. There is a mention of her on a business website, as an accountant, but there is no photo, and her company bio is bland and gives no real details. It’s cleverly written, actually; the words are warm and personable, and yet utterly empty of any pertinent facts.

In fact, her company bio looks suspiciously like all the bios she’s read on Godfrey Norton.

Moran doesn’t put them up in a hotel this time. Hotels have more security than either of them are comfortable with, and even Violet, with a scowl, admits the necessity of avoiding them. Instead, he finds them a half constructed basement, a growing real estate trend in London, apparently

“This one isn’t being built right now,” Moran says, ushering Violet down and then her. He glances around, and then pulls the construction tarp back over the entrance. “I have a mate who knows some people, and he said this one paused because the construction company ran out of money. We’ll be left alone here, and none of the cameras work.”

Joan nods, grimacing as her foot sinks into a muddy patch where the floor is unfinished. It’s certainly one of the worst places they’ve stayed, but glancing around, she can’t help but approve. It’s filthy and dark, and clearly the local homeless population is in and out, so if anyone happens to see them, their presence won’t raise any eyebrows. “Not bad, Moran,” she compliments. He grunts at her and tosses his bag onto a pile of rags that probably served as blankets for someone. Before they leave London, Joan resolves to leave something better behind.

“It’s only a few blocks from her address,” Moran tells her. He sits down in a folding chair. Behind him, Violet is looking at one of the walls and frowning.

“Did your mate mention if this place was structurally sound?” she asks.

“How much reconnaissance do you want to do?” Joan asks, sitting down across from Moran.

He sighs, running a hand over his head. “We know nothing about her, is that right?”

“Right.”

“Normally, I would say weeks. But we won’t be able to go weeks in London without being noticed. The only way we had a full day here last time was because Moriarty didn’t know we were gone yet.”

“So, days then?” Violet asks.

Moran gives Joan a grim look, and Joan nods. She understands. “Hours,” she says.

******  
They don’t even get hours. 

They’re just reaching the one hour mark, Joan sitting in a café across the street from Kensington’s apartment, Moran in another building, watching Kensington from a sniper’s scope, and Violet actually in Kensington’s building, probably mopping floors, when Joan notices a strange convergence of people in the street. 

The street has been busy the entire time she’s been sitting there, with people coming and going, occasionally pausing to window shop, but now she’s noticing people doing more window shopping and lingering more than before. Oddly, she’s not seeing any glances in her direction, or in the general vicinity of Moran. In fact, when they are making glances in the same direction at all, they’re looking to the door of Kensington’s building.

Joan doesn’t think they’re there for her or the Morans at all.

“Moran,” she says softly into the Bluetooth that’s tucked into her ear.

“I see them,” he says.

“Do you think-”

“Four of them have guns.”

“How-”

“There’s a back entrance, to the boiler room. Slip out the back, circle the block. I’ll meet you there.”

She does as he says, making sure her hood is firmly up. She keeps her head down, bobbing her head in time to imaginary music to discourage people from paying any attention to her. When she gets to the back entrance of the apartment complex, Moran is waiting for her. He holds the door open as she darts inside. 

“Violet-”

“Third floor,” Moran says. “She should be a few doors away from Kensington’s. We’ll need to be quick, though. Those people were getting ready for a soft entrance.”

They walk swiftly, but not swiftly enough for Joan to fail to notice the CCTVs that are _everywhere_ in the building. She thinks that is odd; there are always a number of cameras to be avoided, but this seems excessive. 

Joan digs into her pocket and finds a scrap of paper, which she drops on the ground as nonchalantly as she can. “Hold on,” she says, and goes back to pick it up, taking the opportunity to look again at the cameras, discretely. Her suspicions are confirmed. Some of the cameras are wired in, their wires going into the wall and disappearing somewhere, their images likely going to a control room. But other cameras are wireless, mounted with screws that look new, no rust or dust like the wired cameras.

“There are new cameras here,” Joan says, standing up and carefully keeping her head turned away. “There were blindspots in the regular camera coverage, and new ones have been put in in the last week or so.”

“Looks like Kensington is important after all,” Moran says, and speeds up.

Violet is a few doors away from Kensington’s, holding a broom and carefully sweeping debris into a pan, janitor disguise firmly in place. She looks up, alarmed, as Moran barrels down the hallway. “What’s going on?” she hisses. “She hasn’t been out yet.”

“No time for that now,” Moran says. He steps aside as Joan drops down in front of the door, pulling out her lockpicks. She just begins the process of moving the tumblers around when the door swings open.

“You could have just knocked,” a polished voice says, sounding amused but strained. Joan looks up, tucking her lockpicks back in pocket. 

Honor Kensington is a tall woman, pushing six feet. She’s thin, athletic looking, and her dark brown hair is pulled back into a complicated looking hairstyle. Her mouth is quirked into a smile- a smile that Joan recognizes all too well, would recognize from one hundred yards away, would have recognized before if the photo hadn’t been so blurry.

“You’re related to Moriarty,” Joan breathes, too stunned to do anything else.

The familiar smile grows. “You must be Joan Watson,” Honor Kensington says. “I was hoping I would get to meet you, before the end. Everyone else is so certain you’re a meek little prisoner, but I knew… Please, come in.”

Moran helps Joan up, and then moves her slightly behind him as he steps into the apartment. “You realize there are men outside,” he says.

Kensington turns away from him, walking further into her one-room, studio apartment. Despite the relaxed attitude, Joan can see the tension in her shoulders and the way she stays away from the windows.

“She knows,” Joan says.

“Lillie always relied on me being less observant than her. She didn’t think I would notice the extra cameras, the sudden hiring of doormen, the abrupt letting of three apartments on my floor. Lillie never did give me enough credit, not even when we were children.”

“Who’s Lillie?” Violet asks, sounding bewildered. Joan doesn’t take her eyes off Kensington.

“Lillie is Moriarty. The real Moriarty,” Moran says. 

That makes Joan blink, and she looks at Moran, surprised.

“You always were my favorite, Moran,” Kensington says. She sits down on the edge of her bed, crossing her legs. “So much smarter than she thinks. I see a bit of myself in you, Moran, I do.” She looks back at Joan. “You too, of course. That’s how I knew that you weren’t really a prisoner.”

“Why are they here for you?” Joan asks. Her heart is thudding in her ears. She needs answers.

“Because Lillie finally realized I’m the one who has been sabotaging her,” Kensington says calmly. 

Joan closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. They began this conversation in the middle, and they need to go back. Nothing is making any sense.

“Let’s start over,” Joan says. She glances around and sets eyes on a lightweight armchair, which she grabs and pulls over so she can sit down across from Kensington. Moran moves to stand behind her. She can hear Violet moving around the apartment, but pays her no mind. Kensington could be the breakthrough they’ve been looking for. “How are you related to Moriarty?”

“We’re cousins,” Kensington says. “The woman you know as Moriarty is really Lillie Newcomb. We grew up together.”

“And you’ve been sabotaging her?”

“Yes. For quite a while now.”

“Why?”

Kensington’s face twists into a disgusted moue. “Because she got _caught_.”

So much for honorable reasons. Joan thinks it’s possible that Moran is only criminal in Moriarty’s organization with a sense of honor. It’s a frightening thought.

Kensington sighs, picking at some fuzz on her skirt. “Lillie and I have always been close, more like sisters than cousins, really. We were thick as thieves, growing up. We had bright, promising futures ahead of us, and we knew exactly what we wanted. An accountant, a barrister, and a professor. The three of us, together, would use our positions to bring the world to our feet.

“And it worked, for a time. But then we lost our barrister, early on, and our plans… all of our plans fell apart. I was meant to be Lillie’s equal, you see. Never her underling. Never _her accountant_ ,” Kensington sneers. Her pretty face twists into an ugly grimace as she looks to the side. “I was meant to rule by her side.”

“But Moriarty’s plans changed,” Joan coaxes.

“Yes. And I went along with it. I’ve been working for Lillie, rather than with Lillie, for… a decade now.”

“As her accountant,” Moran says.

Kensington shifts her gaze, offering him a small smile. “You say that like it’s a bad thing, Moran. Not all of us want to be assassins. Some of us make sure everyone gets paid, and that any money Moriarty makes gets moved to the right places at the right time.”

“Everyone gets paid,” Joan says. She knows what this means.

Kensington looks back at Joan and gives her a much bigger smile. “Oh yes, Joan. Everyone. I know every single person that has ever worked for Jamie Moriarty. I pay the invoices, such as they are.”

“Moriarty has six accountants,” Violet says. Her voice is coming from over by the kitchen, but Joan doesn’t look her way. 

“Naturally. Moriarty moves millions around every day, and if only one person is doing that, it’s too easy to trace. But I’m her master accountant. I’m the only one who knows everything.”

“So did Slaney, and we have everything we need from him,” Moran says, and darts his eyes briefly to Joan’s. “We don’t need her.”

“Slaney thinks he knows everything, but all he has is a file, right? List of dates, some basic information on a person? It will be awfully hard to prove that crimes were committed by those people at Moriarty’s command with just a Word document. I have proof,” Kensington says, leaning back and smiling a little.

She knows that she’s valuable. Joan wonders what she wants. Protection, perhaps, from the men preparing to storm her building.

“How did you sabotage her?” she asks.

Kensington’s smile curls further upwards, reminding her of Moriarty. They are uncannily similar, facially. “Some money didn’t make it to the right place in time. Some flights were changed at the last minute and communications didn’t reach the right people. Other communications just disappeared, to the detriment of Lillie’s operations. Nothing, I will admit, particularly earth shattering, but it was enough to… inconvenience… her.”

“Is that why they’re coming to kill you?” Moran asks. “Because you sabotaged her and know too much?”

“Well, she certainly can’t let me live,” Kensington agrees amicably.

Joan studies Kensington for a moment. Now that they’re closer, Joan can see the effects of stress on her. Her hair isn’t nearly as shiny as it should be, were it healthy, and her skin is dry. Her makeup is expertly applied, but she can still see slight dark circles underneath her eyes. Her nail polish is chipped in places, and there is the faintest tremor to her hands. Moriarty may have only discovered whatever Kensington was doing in the past week, but Kensington has been living under the cloud of discovery for much, much longer.

“Were you the one who told Devon Gaspar to take Kayden Fuller?” she says abruptly.

Kensington blinks and, for a moment, looks truly surprised. It’s the only time she’s actually seemed off balance since they arrived. “No, of course not. I would never… no. I became disenchanted with it all when she went to jail, but I didn’t break from her until after that. Not long after she began her games with you, actually.”

Joan raises her eyebrows. “Me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Joan. It really had nothing to do with you, just your activities.”

She thinks, and the pieces connect. “The three of you. An accountant, a professor. And a barrister. Godfrey Norton.”

Kensington lets out a long, low breath. “Yes. I knew this was the right choice.” She shudders slightly. “Yes, when Lillie set her sights on Godfrey, that was it for me. We grew up together, we were friends… no matter what, he should have been untouchable.”

“But why?” she asks, frustrated. “He wasn’t part of the organization. You said yourself you lost him early on. He wasn’t a threat- as far as I can tell he had nothing to do with Moriarty. Why did she come after him at all?”

“He knows something,” Moran volunteers, shifting his weight behind her. 

“He knows the most important thing of all,” Kensington agrees. “As do I. The one thing that will end her. I was hoping you would come, before she came to kill me. You need to know this, if you’re to win.”

Kensington stands up and walks across the room to her desk. Moran tenses, his hand going to the knife that Joan knows he keeps hidden in his pants, but she touches his wrist gently, urging him without words towards restraint. She thinks it’s unlikely that Kensington would tell them all of this only to kill them. She doesn’t strike her as the monologuing sort.

Kensington pulls a flash drive from beneath a pile of papers and hands it to Joan. “That contains all the records you will ever need to bring down her empire,” she says. “Every crime she has ever committed, all the money that ever changed hands, every single person who worked with her over the years. That’s everything you will need, except for one thing.”

“And what’s that?”

“For that, you’ll need Godfrey,” Kensington says, and slides open the closet next to her desk.

Moran has his gun out in a heartbeat, pointing it at the man standing in Kensington’s closet. He has his hands raised, a sheepish expression on his blandly handsome face. “Hello,” he says. “It’s a pleasure?”

Joan has spent over a year wondering if she would ever find Norton, if they’d have a confrontation, but she didn’t expect this. He’s an average looking man, average height, and he doesn’t look dangerous. Joan knows better than to make assumptions based on looks, but everyone that Joan has met in Moriarty’s organization has oozed danger in some way, even Kensington in her pencil skirt and cardigan. This man looks so bland that her eyes just want to skim off of him and look at something, anything, more interesting.

“Godfrey. It’s time,” Kensington says quietly. She pulls Norton out of her closet and into the room, her hand lingering on his arm. Joan watches and thinks she understands. 

There is nothing in Norton’s body language that suggests he thinks of Kensington in any way other than perhaps a friend or a business partner. But Kensington is very clearly in love with him, and probably has been for quite some time, if Joan were to guess.

“Will you be all right?” Norton asks, frowning.

Kensington laughs a little. “Of course not, Godfrey, but we always knew that.”

Things continue to slot into place. It was Kensington who gave Norton the warning that Moriarty had given her his name, and probably was the one who helped get him out of the country. Her tipping point, as she said, but not because they were all friends. But because she loved him.

“It doesn’t feel right, leaving you,” Norton argues, gripping her shoulders in the most platonic way Joan can imagine.

“They need the dossier. I can’t leave, but you can. You can take them to the dossier.”

Joan has wondered at the relative ease they’ve had in moving money around. She was never naïve enough to believe that they’d found a way to do it that was untraceable to Moriarty, she just hoped that they were moving fast enough to avoid being caught. Knowing now about Kensington, she wonders if that was part of her sabotage, if she hid evidence of where they were from Moriarty.

Kensington looks away from Norton, back at Joan. “I was hoping you would come here, before Lillie figured me out. You’re the only person out there that’s poised to eliminate her. Godfrey will take you to the dossier she maintains, with information that she doesn’t trust to anyone else. Do you have something that can record?”

“Yes,” Joan says, confused.

“Good. Because her dossier is a person, and he knows the last pieces of information you’ll need. Now go. They’ll be here in just a few minutes. You don’t have much time.”

She doesn’t have time to be surprised, or offer to help her, or ask any more questions- _the dossier is a person?_ \- because Moran grabs her and Norton, pushing them quickly out the door, Violet at his back. He keeps them moving at a fast pace.

“We can still take the elevator,” Moran says, pushing the down button. “They won’t take those offline until they’re in position to storm her apartment.”

“We aren’t going to do anything to help her?” Joan asks, looking back.

“She did everything for Moriarty willingly, Watson,” Moran points out. 

_So did you,_ Joan doesn’t say.

“She’s dying anyway,” Norton says, voice bitter. She looks at him. He’s staring down at his shoes, arms crossed across his body. “Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year ago.”

It’s the final bit of information Joan needs to understand Kensington’s betrayal. People with nothing left to lose do strange things.

The elevator opens and Moran pushes them in. “Where’s this man we need to find, Norton?” he asks.

Norton doesn’t answer for a moment, then sighs. “Not too far. Southernmost point of Hackney.”

“That’s about a thirty minute drive, if the traffic is good,” Violet says. She makes a face. “The traffic is never good, though.”

Norton looks at Violet, his face twisted into shock. “You can’t go there now,” he says sharply. 

Moran sneers at Norton. “If we don’t go now, Norton, she’ll get rid of this dossier man just to ensure we don’t get our hands on him.”

“Why would she even think you’re going after him?” Norton asks. “Honor certainly won’t tell her. Honor’s probably drinking Draino right this second.”

The thought makes Joan sick, but she can’t help but think she might do the same thing, if confronted with the inevitability of Moriarty killing her. “Honor betrayed her, Norton. She’ll-”

“She knows Honor moved some money around, stopped some of her plans from working out. She has _no idea_ that Honor would think of helping you. She doesn’t even know you were there. Even if she does, she doesn’t know Honor and I were in contact, so she won’t think to worry about me giving you any vital information.”

The elevator door dings open, and Moran shoves Joan in front of him and grabs Norton by the back of the collar, forcing him ahead. Joan lets herself shrink and cringe from Moran, just enough for the cameras, and lets Violet step around her so she can wave down a cab.

“Bloody hell, it’s a good thing you quit being a criminal,” Moran mutters, and gives Norton a shove. “She’ll know as soon as she sees the CCTV feeds that we were here and that you’re in the picture. Now, do your best to look scared.”

Joan doesn’t think Norton actually needs any encouragement. He’s small, and fragile-looking, especially as compared to Moran. If they weren’t on the same side, she doesn’t think Norton would last an hour in their company. 

Oh. _Oh._

“Norton, hit Moran,” she commands.

“What?” Norton asks, startled.

“ _What?_ ” Moran asks. 

The cab that Violet managed to flag down pulls up alongside the curb, the cabbie looking bored and tired. He isn’t looking at them at all, which is probably for the best.

“Trust me,” Joan says. “Norton, yank away from Moran, turn, and hit him, as hard as you can. Then try to run. Moran, make sure you grab him immediately. Violet, grab me.”

“The things I do for you, Joan Wat-” Moran’s grumbling is cut off as Norton tugs away and, with a sudden, almost terrifyingly vicious look, punches Moran across the face. It’s a solid hit; she bites back a wince at the sound of Moran’s jaw cracking. But then she starts to run, making sure she doesn’t go too fast. Within seconds, Violet takes her down in a full body tackle.

“Excellent,” Joan whispers to Violet, and lets herself be pulled up, Violet holding on tightly to her arm. Moran has Norton’s arm twisted behind his back.

“Let’s go, then,” he snarls, and opens the cab door. The driver is white knuckling his steering wheel, but hasn’t driven away yet, which Joan counts as a win. Norton is shoved in first, then Violet and Joan get in, and finally Moran.

Before anyone can ask, Joan smiles at the driver. “Thanks for picking us up. We’re a new street theatre group; would you say our act was convincing? We’re looking for feedback.”

It’s a sign that they’re in London that the driver doesn’t even question it, and instead tells them they’re okay actors and asks where they’re going.

******  
Moran has the driver take them Marylebone and then leads them through a series of alleys and mews to a truly decrepit shack behind a closed down restaurant. There are no cameras in the area at all, which she finds questionable until Moran explains that they’re in gang territory.

“They pull them down any time new ones go up,” he explains, and then rounds on Joan. “Care to explain why you had the posh little man give me a punch?”

“Moriarty is going to know the second she sees the feeds that we took Norton,” Joan says, and gingerly sits down on a bench that looks like it might be rotted through. “If she thinks that Norton is a pushover, she’ll go straight for the dossier, worried that he’ll give him up in order to protect himself. By making him look like he has a soul of steel, we might buy ourselves a little extra time, maybe even enough to scope out the house before we go rushing in.”

Moran gives her a long stare, but then grudgingly nods. “Makes some sense,” he says. He looks over at where Norton is standing, making noises about their lodging, and leans in to whisper to Joan, “He actually has a pretty good arm. He may be more dangerous than he looks.”

“Do we really have to stay here?” Norton says loudly from where he’s staring up at the cobweb-covered windows, grime preventing any real sunlight from coming through. “It doesn’t look particularly sanitary.”

“We’ve stayed in worse,” Violet offers.

Joan bites her lip and tries to think. In the moment, she thought that going into hiding for a few days was the best plan, but now that they’re not fleeing Kensington’s place, she’s wondering if that’s true. Despite what she said to Moran, she isn’t sure what Moriarty might do next. Moriarty will know that Norton knows about the dossier, but will she think that Joan is looking for him? Or will Moriarty assume that they took Norton simply because he was at Kensington’s? Or will Moriarty leap to some other conclusion, one that Joan hasn’t thought of?

She’s takes a deep breath.

“Norton,” she says, pushing the doubt from her mind, “what did Kensington mean, that the dossier is a person?”

Norton looks up from where he’s grimacing at what might be a pile of clothes or might have been a human being at one point and blinks. “You mean the great Joan Watson doesn’t already know?”

She smiles tightly. “Presume I don’t and tell me.”

“He’s the origin of Jamie Moriarty. She stole him- his name. His name is James Moriarty. He was… a mentor, of sorts, when we were growing up. He took an interest in us kids at the residential home. He’d come and do tricks for us.”

“Like magic tricks?” asks Violet.

Norton shakes his head. “No, like… he’d tell you where you’d been by looking at your shoe, stuff like that. The best trick was that he could recite every detail he’d seen that day, every moment, every miniscule bit of information he came across.”

“He had a photographic memory,” Joan states.

“He did. Didn’t use it for much, not really. Tricks for us. Neighbourhood gossip and activities. He knew some interesting facts, things that no one else remembered from the news or something, that he would bring up when they suddenly became relevant again.” Norton pauses and licks his lips. He seems to be lost in the nostalgia of his youth, in a way – his eyes are dreamy and distant, and there is a little smile on the edge of his lips. The smile fades as he continues. “He could predict trends, what was going to happen, what people were going to do. That was his other favorite trick. And he never saw the _value_ in his skills. Just thought it was an amusing little quirk of his mind,” he says, acid in his tone. His hair is beginning to droop, falling slightly over his eyes. It’s disarmingly charming. A little too disarmingly charming, in Joan’s opinion.

“We convinced him to teach us how to do it, how to look at the world the way he did. How to look at people, and know them. How to predict what people would do. How to look at Mrs. Jones gardening on one day and know that it meant that Mr. Smith would be sneaking over to Mrs. Ryan’s for sex on the next. He thought it was a silly little trick, so he never even hesitated. He was happy we wanted to learn something.”

Joan thinks about the implications of all that, thinks about Moriarty and her seemingly impossible way of knowing how to push people in just the right way to use them. “How is it possible to learn something like that?” she wonders aloud.

Norton gives her an icy look. “Didn’t you learn how to be a deductive genius? Everything is teachable.”

She considers. It is true that she learned the art of deduction and induction, but she was never quite as good as her teacher. Good enough to make her own way, good enough to survive these past few years, but never quite as good. “But none of you were ever quite as good as him, were you?”

Norton’s look gets even colder, if possible. “No,” he eventually says.

Which is probably the only reason the man is still alive. Joan thinks about the sort of schemes that Moriarty- Lillie- put together over the years, the ones they were able to figure out, and wonders just how many of them Moriarty needed help on.

“If you think Lillie needed help, you’re wrong,” Norton says. “She’s brilliant. She always has been. She loved math, when we were growing up; she took what Jimmy taught us and put it together with her numbers, and the world opened up to her. She became unstoppable. Jimmy is just an information clearinghouse. Everything she’s done, that’s been her.”

“Are you sure about that?” Joan asks. 

“Yes,” Norton says, without hesitation. “I don’t even think he’s a clearinghouse anymore, to be honest. I think she just likes to gloat, throw in his face what she became, with his help.”

That sounds like Moriarty. 

“You don’t work for her anymore. Or with her, or whatever,” Violet says from his other side, giving him an intense look. “Why not?”

“She took something from me and forced me out,” Norton says. He doesn’t look at any of them as he says it, staring instead at the puddle he just stepped in. The shack, it appears, is not waterproofed. As she watches him standing there, looking at his own feet, she thinks about how small he looks, how childish. She can’t understand how Moriarty ever considered him as a potential partner-in-crime.

Unless…

She stands up abruptly, knowing with certainty that she’s right and hoping she’s wrong. Suddenly, she knows just how Norton fits. She can see it so clearly. She doesn’t understand how it took her this long to get there. It’s so _obvious._ “You’re Kayden’s biological father.”

He licks his lips and makes a deep humming noise in this throat instead of answering immediately, but it’s enough for confirm for Joan, even more so than his low, “I am.”

“She didn’t want the baby. It didn’t fit into her plans for the three of you. So she gave the baby to the Fullers.”

“And that’s the last time I saw Lillie for years,” Norton confirms. His eyes are wide and glossy. He looks on the verge of tears.

“Why?” she asks. It doesn’t make sense.

“Lillie was… ruthless. She always has been. But when it came to me, she- she was almost kind. Kind for her, anyway. I didn’t expect- I didn’t think she’d take our daughter away from me. I knew she wouldn’t want to _raise_ it, I’m not stupid. But I thought she would let me… that I could take care of it. I told her that, when she told me she was pregnant. I told her that she could run the empire, and I would run our household. I would have been happy with that. I went to her flat the next day, with flowers, and she was gone,” Norton says, his voice weary. “I never found out why. Maybe she thought I was weak, for wanting to raise our baby.”

Joan’s heart tugs without her permission. “I’m sorry.”

“I wanted my daughter, more than anything in the world. She was _mine_. It wasn’t until three years ago, right before Lillie went to jail, that I discovered that she hadn’t had an abortion. I ran into her, quite by accident, and she told me that our daughter was in good care.” Norton gives Joan a twisted smile. “Like I said, when it came to me, she was almost kind.”

Joan watches him, stares at his sad brown eyes, his floppy hair, his pathetic smile. Every part of her screams that she needs to take care of him, protect him. She doesn’t trust that impulse an iota.

“Not to interrupt this fascinating story, love, but it’s getting dark. We need to secure this place and think about getting a watch going on this dossier bloke’s place,” Moran says, scowling at Norton. He looks angry. She makes a note to ask him what he thinks about Norton when they have a moment, but nods at him. She looks at Violet, who is standing near the entrance and looking antsy.

“Right. Violet, do you think you can take first watch on the place James Moriarty is being kept?”

Violet raises her eyebrows. “If I know where it is?”

Joan looks at Norton expectantly and he obediently rattles off an address in Hackney. Violet tips an imaginary hat towards Joan and is gone almost immediately, sliding easily between the boards that provide them meagre protection from prying eyes.

“We’re staying here tonight?” Norton asks, wrinkling his nose.

Moran stomps over to the pile of dirty fabric in the corner, scoops it up, and throws it at Norton. “Yeah, we are. Better get comfortable, Your Highness. No more of the easy life for you.”

Norton glares at Moran, but does what he’s told. Joan watches him as he gingerly sets the rags back on the ground, spreading them out with the toe of his shoe, and then lays down. For all of his prissiness, she’s amused to see him fall asleep almost instantly.

She used to be particular about her sleeping arrangements, too. Once. A long time ago.

They work in silence for a while, trying to get as much in front of the entrance as they can. The shack doesn’t give them much to work with, unfortunately. It was probably a place for chopping up large amounts of vegetables for the restaurant (which might, she reflects, be the reason the restaurant is now shut down), and it shows, with a bench and some rotten wood being about the only thing available to them. They won’t be able to stay there long. She thinks they’ll have to move sometime during the night, for safety’s sake. 

She hates being back in London. She feels an itch between her shoulder blades, the certainty that every move they make is being watched.

“You don’t like him,” she says quietly after some time passes.

Moran snorts. “’Course not.”

“Why?” she asks, genuinely curious. She knows her gut is telling her that he’s harmless, a victim in the entire thing. It’s because of that that she doesn’t trust him. Normally, she wouldn’t be nearly so sympathetic towards a man angry that his former partner didn’t allow him input on her pregnancy. Normally, she might feel sad for him, but she wouldn’t see him as a victim. 

She thinks they’re being manipulated. She just doesn’t know for sure. She doesn’t have any proof, other than her faulty gut.

Moran’s frown gets even deeper, the corners of his mouth disappearing entirely underneath the folds of skin. “Bit convenient, innit? This whole having a baby with Moriarty thing?”

“I investigated the Kayden Fuller case,” Joan reminds him. “She has a daughter.”

“Yeah, but with… him?” Moran looks incredulous.

“He seems sweet. Charming, really. A little useless,” she admits, trying to look at Norton without the seed of suspicion in her stomach.

“And that’s something you think Moriarty would like?”

“Moriarty? No. Moriarty doesn’t… she doesn’t have feelings. But Lillie, maybe? Lillie could have fallen in love. They were young.” She says it without thinking.

Moran shakes his head and mutters something under his breath that Joan can’t catch. “What was that?”

He pauses, looking at the broken trunk he found towards the back of the shack, and then looks right at her, gaze steady. “I said, it seems like Lillie and Irene have a lot in common. Remember, Watson, that there is only ever Moriarty. The other women she wears… they aren’t real.”

He's right – he’s even quoting her – and she knows that. It niggles at her. “Lillie is who she really is,” Joan says, though she doesn’t believe that.

“No,” Moran corrects, turning back towards the entrance. “Moriarty is who she really is. It just took her a little longer to find and steal the name.”

******  
Joan tosses and turns most of the night.

Violet comes back from the first watch safe, letting them know that there was some movement around the Hackney address when she got there, but everything calmed down within the hour. She falls asleep on the ground next to Norton, and Moran waves his farewell and goes off to take next watch, leaving Joan functionally alone in the shack. When he gets back, he tells her to go to sleep; there is no movement, so it isn’t worth leaving yet.

She lays down, but she can’t sleep.

She thinks for a long time about what Moran said about Moriarty. Moriarty, she knows, is a sociopath. She’s incapable of love. She doesn’t understand it. Whatever Moriarty believes about herself, Joan knows better. She doesn’t love Kayden. She never loved Norton. They’re merely property, reflections of how she views herself.

Norton should know that. If he grew up with the girl Moriarty was once, Joan doesn’t think he could have missed the signs. Especially since they planned a criminal empire together. His repeated assertions that Moriarty was some form of kind towards him, his belief that Moriarty would even consider keeping the child… it feels false.

It’s possible, of course, that he convinced himself of a comforting lie. It wouldn’t be the first time Moriarty has twisted men, Joan knows. But that doesn’t feel right, either. Joan has seen the destructive path Moriarty leaves behind; Norton doesn’t look like a shell, even with his sad eyes and broken smiles.

She doesn’t know what it is yet, but there is something _wrong_ about Norton and his story. And despite that, she wants to protect him. She wants to help him. He’s Kayden’s biological father.

“Irene never existed,” she whispers to herself as the first light begins to peak through the boards. “Lillie never existed. There is only ever Moriarty.”

******  
They find a new safe house while the sun is still rising, this time in a rundown tower block that has somehow managed to avoid gentrification. Norton claims first shower (Joan isn’t sure she’d trust the water in this building, from what she saw when they snuck in). The moment she hears the water running and the momentary dip in the sound of water that signals Norton stepping under the spray, she turns to Violet.

“What do you think about Norton?”

“He’s slimy and I don’t trust him,” Violet says immediately.

“Why?” Joan fires back. She needs gut reactions, not thoughts.

“He’s too charming,” Violet says, just as rapid-fire, and then pauses. “I didn’t really think of it like that before now. He reminds me of some actors I know- knew.”

Joan ignores the slip of the tongue. “How?”

“I feel like he’s trying to get into my pants and just hasn’t come right out and said it, you know? And that the moment he does, I’m going to realize what a bastard he really is.”

“Hope you’re talking about a coworker’s experience,” Moran mumbles. He’s standing along the wall by the one window in the entire room, staring intently at the outside below.

Violet rolls her eyes. “I could take care of myself. But he reminds me of them, a bit. A little too polished. A little too perfect.”

Joan considers this, chews on it. “Keep an eye on him,” she says.

“I am,” Moran says gruffly.

“Not you,” she says, then corrects herself. “Well, yes, you. But Violet. I want you to watch him.”

She nods, but looks confused. “What am I watching him for?” she asks.

Joan doesn’t know. There is nothing that she can pinpoint as a warning sign. He’s a perfectly average, boring man. 

Maybe that’s the warning sign.

“For whatever your gut tells you is wrong,” she says finally. “There’s something wrong here, and I don’t know what it is yet.”

Joan doesn’t say, _you’re a woman; you’ll know it when you see it_ , but that’s what she means. Her gut wants to protect Norton, but right now, she’s concluded her gut is unreliable, at least when it comes to him. Norton is connected to Kayden, and Joan knows she isn’t quite rational when it comes to Kayden.

That’s the only reason that Norton makes her feel protective.

The only reason.

******  
They spend three more days in the tower block.

Joan itches to take a watch on where James Moriarty is being kept, but she knows well enough that she can’t. It makes for three excruciatingly boring days, however. She and Norton watch a lot of television. She’s really getting into _The Great British Bakeoff._

She’s sleeping on the sofa, the one bedroom reserved for Violet or Moran, whichever one isn’t on watch, while Norton sleeps in the bathtub. Strangely, she wakes up the morning of their second full day there to find Moran sleeping on the floor next to the sofa.

“Um?” she asks, coughing slightly to wake him.

He blinks up at her. He looks almost innocent, freshly awake. “I don’t trust him,” he breathes out quietly, and then goes into the kitchen and starts pouring a bowl of cereal for her.

Moran isn’t the only one getting oddly protective. Violet sits closer to her, first just her shoulder brushing companionably against Joan’s, and culminating in her being pressed from shoulder to thigh against Joan’s side one night during _British Bakeoff._ Joan sometimes catches Violet giving Norton long, considering looks when he’s occupied with something else.

She would think they’re acting like idiots, if she hadn’t asked them to keep an eye out. And if she, too, didn’t keep noticing something slightly… off, with Norton.

It’s nothing concrete, nothing she can quite put her finger on. Looks that last too long. Silences that don’t quite make sense. Body language that is subtly wrong at times. Which is nothing, really, but something still doesn’t make sense. She’d write him off as awkward, but he’s not. Not when he knows people are looking.

She knows she can’t keep him around. He isn’t safe. She doesn’t know why he isn’t safe, but he isn’t. But she can’t cut him loose. He knows too much.

She doesn’t know what to do. Violet helps her figure it out.

“What does he want? Why is he here?” Violet whispers to her on their third full night at the flat. Like Moran, she’s taken to sleeping next to the sofa at night, when she isn’t watching the Hackney address.

“What?” Joan whispers back. She wonders if Norton is listening.

“Kensington was hiding him from Moriarty, because Moriarty wants him dead so you can’t get information about the dossier from him, right? That’s the theory?”

“Yes,” Joan confirms.

“Except that doesn’t make sense. Why point you right at Norton, back in New York, if she didn’t want you to know about him? There has to be another reason. She needed him out of the picture for another reason.”

Joan has spent enough time with Violet to trust her ideas, and she mulls over possibilities for why Moriarty would need Norton removed from the picture. Only one thing makes sense.

On their fourth day in the tower blocks, over cereal, with Moran reassuringly in the next room, Joan says, “I’m going to find her, you know.”

Norton blinks at her. “Who?”

“Kayden. Your daughter. I’m going to find her.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You are.” It’s not a question.

“I made myself a promise a long time ago. I’m going to find her. I’m going to bring her home,” she says. She has a pretty good idea of where she needs to push. She hopes she’s wrong.

Norton’s smile is different this time. It’s broader, and the corners of his eyes wrinkle. It is, she realizes with alarm, the first genuine smile he’s actually given her. His other smiles were so close to the real thing that she didn’t even notice the difference. “I would really like that,” he says, and reaches across the table, resting his hand on her wrist.

She swallows around a suddenly dry throat. She wasn’t wrong. “And maybe the Fullers will let you visit with her,” she says.

Norton’s smile freezes, just enough that she knows exactly what’s wrong. “What do you mean?’ he says. His hand doesn’t move from her wrist.

“Well, the Fullers would have to agree to it, of course,” she says, trying to seem careless and raising her voice, just a little. “But I can give you a reference or something. Talk to them about how much you want to meet her.”

His hand still hasn’t moved from her wrist. It feels heavy. “Kayden is my daughter,” he says.

“Kayden is your biological offspring. She is the Fullers’ daughter,” she corrects, letting her voice drift as naturally as she can to an even louder volume.

“I don’t think you quite understand, Joan,” Norton says, and _there_ it is. The part of Norton that must have made him appealing to Moriarty, and maybe even Kensington, as a potential partner. The charming smile, the puppy dog eyes, the strong hand that begins to curl around her wrist in a deceptively gentle grip… Joan knows what she’s looking at, and part of her still feels _bad_ for him. “Lillie never even gave me a choice, she just took Kayden and spirited her away. I wanted it more than anything. It’s _mine_. It took me years to find my child.”

Joan doesn’t look away from him. “You were the one that let Gaspar know about Kayden.”

“Of course,” he says. 

“He wasn’t supposed to use her to blackmail Moriarty, was he?”

“That bastard betrayed me. He was supposed to get the child for me, bring it to me. My daughter isn’t leverage for Gaspar to use.”

Joan forces herself to breath normally. Norton won’t hurt her, she’s certain of it. He isn’t Britch. Moran is in the next room, and she’s pretty sure he’s awake, and she is perfectly safe.

As safe as she can be while looking yet another sociopath in the eye. As safe as she can be while that sociopath has a grip on her wrist.

“She isn’t your daughter,” she says as evenly as she can. She’s played this game before, literally, with a Go board between her and her enemy. She’s had this same conversation before. This is nothing new. “Her family is the Fullers. It has been since the moment Moriarty left her with them and walked away.”

“The only reason they even had my daughter was because Lillie wanted to punish me. Kayden doesn’t belong to them.”

Joan wonders at that word choice, _punish_ , but leaves it alone. “She doesn’t _belong_ to anyone. She isn’t property, to be shuttled around. The Fullers raised her. They love her.”

“They let it go.”

“She was forcibly taken from them. By you. Her father died trying to protect her.”

“I’m still here.”

“Her _real_ father.”

It’s a step too far, and Joan knows it. Norton’s face goes hard at the same time as his hand tightens to a frightening degree. 

She hears a click behind her. The cocking of a gun. She finds the sound comforting these days. “How’s about you let her go, hmm?” Moran says amicably. Joan doesn’t have to look to know that he’s aiming his gun right at Norton’s head.

Norton lets go of her immediately and stands, throwing his hands up, his face looking innocent and scared before she even notices the change. “What’s this, Moran? What are you doing?”

“Don’t even try it,” Moran says, and steps into Joan’s view. He’s rolling his eyes in disgust. She lets out a breath.

“Try what? I wasn’t making a move on your bird, mate, I promise. We were just talking, that’s all,” he babbles.

Joan has to admire how seamless his change from shark to terrified man is. It’s what she’d been expecting to see at some point, given her uncertainty and Violet’s gut instincts, but she didn’t expect it to be so flawless. She can see why he was a barrister. And she can see, now, why he and Moriarty had been a pair at one point. They make perfect sense together. Far more sense than anyone else.

“Don’t bother,” she says, standing up. Moran automatically moves slightly in front of her, his shoulder obscuring her left side, his gun never wavering from Norton. “Thank you for showing us who you really are.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Norton whines. He looks at Moran. “Moran, tell me what’s going on. Why are you pointing a gun at me?”

“Seems obvious to me, _mate_ ,” Moran growls. “Keep your hands off Joan.”

“What is wrong with you people?” Joan says, not bothering to hide the anger in her voice, ignoring Moran. “You and Moriarty, you really are a pair. Neither of you even hesitate to use children as pawns, do you?” She ignores the niggling feeling that she’s not quite innocent of doing the same.

“I just want my daughter, Joan. I just want it back.”

“Do you even hear yourself? It, it, _it_. She isn’t even a person to you. She’s just an object,” she shouts, losing her temper. Moran gives her a look, and she forces herself to take a deep breath and speak quietly again. They can’t afford to be overheard. “She was never yours, Norton. You don’t know her at all. You just want the idea of her.”

“It- _she’s_ my daughter. Isn’t that enough?”

“No,” Joan says flatly. “Being half of a person’s chromosomes doesn’t make you a parent. I’m sorry that Lillie made a choice that you didn’t agree with, but I highly doubt that someone with your resources was unable to find your biological daughter for ten years. Something happened that made Kayden Fuller interesting again, and you decided to use her. A goddamn child. You don’t use children, Norton. They’re off limits.”

“Kayden is _mine_ ” Norton snarls, lunging forward. He stops before coming within grabbing distance of her, which she’s pretty sure is the only thing that keeps him alive. Moran shoots him the instant he comes at her.

Norton crumbles to the ground, clutching his calf. “You bastard! You shot me!” He sounds genuinely surprised. Joan doesn’t know why. 

“I warned you,” Moran snarls. “You keep your bloody hands off Joan. You’re lucky I didn’t put one through your eye.” He looks over his shoulder at Joan. “Grab your bags and Vi’s. Our timetable has been pushed up.”

Someone will have heard the gunshot. Which means CCTVs in the area will be checked, and descriptions will be given, and soon Moriarty will have an inkling of where they are. Joan turns her back to Norton and heads towards the bedroom, where they’ve been keeping their things.

“Joan!” Norton cries out, his voice pathetic once more. She pauses and looks back at him. The shark has been put away again, replaced by the slightly dopey, somewhat useless, sweet and befuddled man she first met. She wonders which one Kensington loved. She doesn’t have to wonder about Moriarty.

“Please,” he begs. “That’s my _daughter_. I need her.”

Joan walks back over to him and crouches down so that she’s at eye level with him. “Children aren’t pawns. They aren’t soldiers. They aren’t games. She isn’t yours. I don’t know what you want her for, but you can’t have her. Walk away while you still can.”

Norton’s face contorts, the pathetic loser disappearing beneath the man he really is. “You can’t even beat Lillie,” he says, and spits in her face.

Joan doesn’t blink. “Watch me.”

They leave Norton bleeding on the floor. She doesn’t look back again.

******  
Moran gets them to the Hackney address in under twenty minutes, despite the road closures and traffic. It’s impressive. She would tell him so, except they both know that the endgame has been unexpectantly triggered. She wasn’t expecting this. She doesn’t know why- finding the dossier, getting what James Moriarty knows, is the final piece they need, according to Honor Kensington. Yet as she gets out of the car that Moran stole for them, she finds herself feeling stunned.

This is it. It could all be over soon.

She could go _home_.

She shakes off the feeling and looks at Moran. He looks pale, drawn. She wonders if he’s thinking the same thing. “Nice work,” she says. He looks at her blankly. “For the time of the trip,” she clarifies. “And for intervening when you did.”

“Never liked him,” he says simply, and shuffles her into the bushes. Violet is there, waiting for them.

“What happened?” she asks as soon as they’re in earshot.

“Nothing that needs to be discussed now,” Moran says, all business. He looks at Joan. “How do you want to do this?”

The Hackney address is a neat, lovely townhouse. There are a few lights on inside, but the curtains are drawn. She’s reminded, painfully, of where Violet was kept and wonders if she’s found the origin of Moriarty’s obsession with locking people away. “You think there will be guards?”

“I think there will be more guards in there than anywhere else, if she considers that man her dossier.”

Joan studies the house, thinking, chewing on her lip. Moriarty never wanted her to find Kensington, she’s absolutely sure of that. And the entire reason she wouldn’t want them to find her is tied to the man inside. 

“Joan,” Moran says quietly.

“Do what you need to do,” she says, managing, barely, to say the words without choking.

Moran nods. “Let’s go.”

******  
The locks on the back door are the best Joan has come up against in years, but they’re still no match for her lockpicks, and so she eases the door open, using the WD40 she carries in her kit to make sure the hinges don’t squeak. There are no tripwires across the door, and the tiles on the kitchen floor look secure, no pressure plates that she can see. She stays low as she pushes the door all the way open, Moran behind her, his gun pointed steadily ahead.

Moran looks around the kitchen, considering. He jerks his head at a small door to the side. “That’s a pantry,” he whispers. “Vi, Watson, get inside it. I’ll handle whatever guards there might be.”

“Moran-” Joan begins, but he shakes his head firmly.

“Not up for debate, love. Get in there. Protect my sister.”

Violet makes a face at him, but Joan can see his point. She and Violet would only be in the way anyway. Violet’s weapon training is minimal, and as for herself, she has no interest in touching a gun. The pantry is the best place for them, she can see that. She takes Violet by the arm and guides her over.

“Be careful,” she whispers to Moran.

He nods grimly, his eyes locked on hers, as she closes the door on them.

For a moment, everything is quiet. The only thing Joan can hear is the hushed rasp of Violet’s breath. But then everything erupts, all at once. She hears footsteps, exclamations of surprise and anger which quickly become shouts and yells as gunfire starts going off. She closes her eyes tight, hoping fervently that Moran can handle himself against… however many people are out there. There should be, from what they’ve seen, three or four people. But that’s too many against one person, in her opinion. She feels fumbling against her, and then Violet is squeezing her hand. Joan clutches it back as hard as she can. 

Then things go still. Joan holds her breath.

The door to the pantry opens. She opens her eyes, and Moran is in front of her, looking unharmed but tense.

“That’s all of them. Hurry up.”

Joan walks quickly through the house, looking at the bodies of the guards on the ground. There are four of them, like they predicted. To her surprise, none of them are dead. All of the guards have been shot- but for one, who was clearly hit over the head with the shattered lamp on the ground next to him- but they’re all fairly minor wounds, or at least not immediately lethal. She looks at Moran in askance, and he shrugs a shoulder.

“I did what I needed to do. Nothing more.”

She smiles at him, and then heads up the stairs, Moran at her back. Violet stays behind, taking a gun from Moran and pointing it at the guards. 

There are three rooms at the top of the stairs. Two of the doors are closed, but the third stands open. She can hear the sound of an oxygen machine in that room. She walks towards it as Moran heads off to inspect the other rooms.

When she walks into the room, she’s struck by how dark it is. The blinds are drawn, only a sliver of light slipping through them, and there are no lights on. It smells musty, yet medical. She can smell ointments and cleaning supplies. In the center of the room is a bed, a small, wizened man lying on it. He’s hooked up to a number of machines, including the oxygen machine that she could hear from the hallway. He looks ancient, but when Joan looks at him closer, she realizes that he can’t be much older than fifty-five.

“You must be James Moriarty. The original,” she says, stepping up next to his bedside.

The man turns his face towards her and she sees the clouding over his eyes. He gives her a cracked, fragmented grin even as he turns his head back towards the ceiling.

“That I am,” he says. His accent is distinctly working class, nowhere near the posh accent that Jamie Moriarty has. “And you must be Joan Watson. You’re all she can talk about these days, you know. Used to be her man with the funny name, but now it’s all Joan, Joan, Joan…”

He trails off, staring blankly at the ceiling. There is no chart at the foot of his bed, not like there would be in a real medical establishment, but she can just look at the machines and know what’s happening. “You’re dying, Mr. Moriarty.”

“Call me Jimmy,” he says, and he looks back at her. He squints for a long moment, then begins carefully lifting himself into a sitting positon. Joan steps forward and helps arrange the pillows behind his back. Once he’s set up, he lets out a slow breath. “Less confusion if you call me Jimmy. I’m not really Moriarty anymore, now am I? But yes, I’m dying. Congestive heart failure. They think I might have a few years left in me yet, though. I’m glad you got here before I went. I wanted to see you. To meet you. The woman who has vexed Lillie. I knew you had to be someone special.”

“Watson,” Moran says from the door. She turns, and he jerks his head downstairs. She nods at him, and he leaves her, going to guard the rest of the house.

Joan sits down on the edge of the bed and pulls her phone out, setting it to record. She isn’t sure what all she wants to ask him, now that she’s here. How does someone talk to an innocent prisoner? He must have only been in his forties when Moriarty took him. “How did this happen?” she asks quietly.

Jimmy snorts. “I should have seen it coming. Lillie was always an odd child. Bright, of course.” He laughs, abruptly, three barks before settling back again. “Bright is not what I should call her. Brilliant. I met her when she was five, you know, shortly after her parents died? Didn’t really meet her, of course. Didn’t start volunteering with the residential home until she was seven, I think… She was already doing complex math. I guess her parents were some sort of mathematicians, or something. Taught her what they could, before they passed. She was five. I saw her for the first time when she was five. I was walking by the residential home on my way to work – I’d just left the military and got myself a job working at the railway station down the street – and all the kids were out with sidewalk chalk. And I look down, and there’s this small blonde kid sitting away from the others, writing out equations that I _still_ don’t understand… made an impression. I remembered her, when I started volunteering… I should have seen it coming.”

Joan licks her lips. She doesn’t know how long they have before someone else comes to check on James Moriarty; she needs him to go faster. “Being a smart kid doesn’t mean you grow up to be a criminal, Jimmy,” she says urgently.

She thinks he picks up on her nervousness, because he purses his lips and focuses on a space ahead of him. “I taught her and the other two kids, her little gang, all of my memory tricks and tried to show them how I saw the world. I think in patterns, Ms. Watson. It’s tricky to explain, but I somehow just _know_ how things are gonna work out, most of the time. So I tried to teach them. Then they went away to Uni- well, Godfrey and Honor did. Their families left them a pretty good nest egg. Lillie didn’t have the money, though, not for where she wanted to go. Remember how crushed she was… I don’t know what happened to her during those years, but one day there was a knock on my door, and when I opened it, there she was, all grown up. And then there was a bag over my head, and I woke up here.”

Joan tries to figure out when that would have been. “You’ve been here… fifteen years?” she asks, aghast.

Jimmy nods and smiles sadly. “Sounds about right. I stopped counting after a while. Didn’t see any point in it. I was never going to leave. She couldn’t let me – I was a clear link to her past. And she made it impossible, after my fifth escape attempt.” He pulls back the covers from his legs. They’re misshapen, badly deformed. Joan swallows tightly. “Did that with a baseball bat herself. Didn’t even send someone else to take care of me. Flew out special, just for me.” There’s a bit of pride in his voice about that.

Joan wonders if that’s what she would have become, if she hadn’t had Moran to push, if there had really been no way to escape. If she would become proud of herself for eliciting some reaction from Moriarty. She thinks she knows the answer to that, and she doesn’t like it.

“Jimmy, this is going to sound insensitive, but-”

“Why am I still alive?” he asks bluntly. He nods. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it? I would have thought she’d off me a long time ago, especially after she started really telling me her secrets. She’s told me so much over the years, I could get her hanged. Yet here I am.”

“You have no idea why?” she asks.

“If I had to guess… I think it makes her happy, in some way, that someone sees the world in the same way she does. She learned my tricks, while I come by them naturally, but I don’t think there are many other folks in the world who know what’s going to happen to the agricultural market in, say, Indonesia because of the actions of some rebels in Colombia. We’re cut from the same cloth, in her eyes. I have a soul, of course. Big difference between us, there. I just wanted to work my job at the rail station; she wanted the world.”

Joan considers this. That’s a possibility, she thinks. Moriarty has certainly been intrigued by people who “look” like her, in a way. Her treatment of Kayden, her interest in Joan, the men in her life, they all fit the same pattern. But that still doesn’t make much sense. He’s too much of a risk to Moriarty; he knows her life story, he apparently knows her crimes, and there he sits, alive if not well.

“She told you about her work?” Joan asks, pushing the thought aside. At least for the time being. She wonders if they can bring him with them. She has so many questions.

“Lillie always wanted someone to recognize how brilliant she is,” Jimmy says, nodding. His hands are clutching spasmodically at the sheets, which he’s pulled back over his legs. “She got rid of Godfrey when they had the baby, and then she forced Honor into some minor role, and she didn’t have any peers anymore. So she told me. She visits me about once a month to tell me how smart she is. Which wars she’s triggering that will impact which stocks and how much money she’s making. Which people she’s having bumped off in order to make way for a new order. What art is fake, which pieces hang in which of her homes.”

Joan takes a deep breath. “Jimmy. I have been told you have a photographic memory.”

“I don’t think such a thing exists, myself. I do have a good memory, though.”

“Do you think you could tell me about her crimes? I met with Honor Kensington a few days ago, and she gave me enough evidence to start dismantling Moriarty’s organization. But if you can tell me what you know, that would help.”

Jimmy pats her hand. “You’ve already dismantled most of her network, you know. Lillie’s been most distressed this past year. I thought it was Moran, myself, but here you are.”

“Jimmy. Can you tell me about her crimes?” she says again, trying to hold back hope that this frail little man will be her key to going home.

He licks his lips, and then shakes his head. “No, I can’t.” Joan’s heart falls. “There just isn’t enough time. I recorded her, though. Would the recording help?”

She stops breathing. “You have a recording?” she says, her voice sounding strangled even to her.

Jimmy nods, and contorts slightly to dig around behind his headboard. After a few seconds he pulls out a slim black voice recorder. “A few years back, I had a nurse who became a bit attached to me. Didn’t like Lillie much, didn’t trust her story about me being a doddering old man – I think she wanted me to play along with that bit of fiction, but I had trouble with that – and so she brought me a recorder. Told me to tape Lillie.”

Joan looks at the device sitting in Jimmy’s hand. For over a year she’s been working on bringing Moriarty’s network down, and one broken man in London has the tools to bring it all down in just minutes.

“The nurse was fired, of course, not too long after. I kept the recorder, though. Thought if I ever had the chance…” he trails off. He holds out his hand and places the recorder in Joan’s. “You’ll make good use of it, I think.”

“I will,” she says. It’s a vow.

“I hope you do. Now, I’d like to ask you for a favor, Joan.”

She looks at the deceptively innocent recorder in her hand and nods absently, pulling her bag towards her and tucking it safely inside one of the zippered pockets before taking her phone back and doing the same. “Anything.”

“Could you kill me, please?”

He’s so polite about it that Joan is inhaling to say “of course” before she really hears his request. When she finally processes it, she stares at him. Jimmy’s eyes are wide, a sparkling blue that remains unclouded by age or stress, and he looks almost innocent, almost child-like. His hands are folded neatly in his lap. 

“What?”

“Would you please kill me? I’ve been here for so long… and the moment she realizes I had contact with you and your Moran, she’ll make me suffer for it.”

Joan shakes her head. “She won’t have an opportunity to do anything to you,” she says.

Jimmy gives her a pitying look. “Now, Joan. We know it will take you some time to get that recording to someone. And you know she’s already on her way.”

She shakes her head again, harder this time. “We were careful. She doesn’t know we’re here yet. I’ll have time, I promise.”

“Joan. She knew you were here the moment you set foot into this house. Do you think guards are the only thing keeping me here?” he asks. His voice is so gentle, and he unfolds a hand from his lap and takes hers. “There are hidden cameras everywhere. You had to know this. She’ll be here soon. I’m sure some of her goons have already been dispatched to this house.”

As if on cue, she hears a gunshot below, and Moran bellows, “Watson! We have company!” before the sounds of more gunfire erupt downstairs. Joan looks wildly at Jimmy, who is still holding her hand.

“Please,” he says softly. “Please. I’ve asked so many people, so many times… please…”

“I can’t,” she says around a completely dry throat. Where her throat is dry, her eyes go wet. “I’m sorry. I’m going to stop her. I’ll try to stop her before she can get… before she comes back.”

Jimmy closes his eyes for a brief moment, and then pats her hand. “It’s all right. No one else could do it either. Now go. Sounds like your time is up.”

The gunfire is almost constant now. Joan looks at the door, can just see the stairs, and hopes Moran is holding them off. At least enough for them to escape. She stands and grabs her bag, then looks at Jimmy. He’s staring out the window, seemingly oblivious to the chaos downstairs. He looks older than Joan knows he really is. He looks sad. Defeated.

Joan thinks she might have looked like that, given enough time.

She opens up her bag and rummages towards the bottom, not giving herself time to second guess herself, not giving herself time to think. Her hand finds what she needs, and she pulls out the pocket knife and puts it next to Jimmy.

Just in case.

Then she flees the room, turning her attention to whatever is happening below, willing herself to forget about the sad man in the room behind her and what he may do with her knife.

She doesn’t get far. Somehow, a woman has gotten past Moran and is on the stairs, coming towards her. She’s holding a gun and pointing it toward Joan. 

Most of Joan’s training, back when she was an apprentice, was in boxing and singlestick. But she doesn’t have a singlestick, and boxing, while useful, isn’t what she needs in this moment. It’s the training Moran gave her that her body remembers best, and she gets in close to the woman with the gun and uses her momentum, her energy, to knock the gun from the woman’s hand. It hits the ground hard, and Joan kicks it away.

She can still hear gunfire downstairs, and distantly, part of her registers a woman screaming. Violet, she thinks, but she can’t care because the woman is swinging at her. She ducks the first three swings, moving out of the way, but the fourth swing she steps into, grabbing the woman’s arm and flipping her onto the ground.

The woman is up again in a flash, her face hard and focused. She takes another swing at Joan and she doesn’t duck it in time. She takes it in the face and nearly goes down. She grabs the railing, clinging to it for balance. She can hear ringing in her ears, but she can’t tell if that’s from getting hit or if it’s from all the gunfire.

There’s too much gunfire. Moran is good, but she doesn’t think he can hold them off indefinitely. She knows he can’t; the proof is standing in front of her.

“Moran!” she yells, hoping to hear his voice.

The woman sneers. “You’re pathetic,” she says. She has an English accent, not nearly as upper class as Moriarty’s and not nearly as working class as Moran’s.

“Still standing,” Joan pants, giving the woman her best smirk. She doesn’t know who she is. She isn’t one of Moriarty’s assassins. She might just be some sort of hired help; Moriarty certainly had plenty of people who didn’t fall into any particular group and were not much more than hirelings. They’d even taken a few of them out, in the past year.

The woman comes at her again and wraps her arms around her. Joan kicks her shin hard with her heel, and the grip loosens just enough for her to maneuver herself into a better position, and then she breaks the hold, exactly like Moran taught her in Prague, months upon months ago. Just like she did a few weeks ago, in a different city, in a different country.

It’s the arms that do it. The panic begins to set in, and Joan can’t hear the gunfire over her heart in her ears. Her vision starts to tunnel, and all she can see is the sick grin on the woman’s face and her hands, more like claws, coming at her again. For a moment, she looks exactly like Britch – which doesn’t make sense, because they look nothing alike. But for a moment she’s so certain it’s him and Joan’s stomach bottoms out.

“Moran!” she screams again.

“Watson!” she hears him yell back, but his voice is distant, too far away, and she really is alone, again, and this time she doesn’t have a gun.

She won’t be helpless again.

A different sort of terror kicks in, a cold, reptilian terror, and she stops thinking entirely. She forgets about Jimmy in the other room, about the recorder in her bag, about the gunfire downstairs. She thinks only about Moran patiently talking her through jujutsu moves, carefully positioning her limbs, demonstrating how to grapple, how to kick, how to bite, how to _survive_. For a moment, she also thinks about another man showing her how to punch, how to strike, how to guard, how to _survive_. And she thinks about all the time she worked, on her own, learning how to survive. Not just learning. Doing it. 

She has survived so much already. She can survive this.

The woman comes at her again. Joan moves with her, ducks her shoulder low, underneath the woman’s, and rolls her up and over – and down the stairs. The woman yelps and Joan hears her go thudding all the way down.

She takes a shaky breath, braces herself, and turns around. The woman is lying at the bottom of the stairs, her leg twisted beneath her, her eyes squinting with pain, lips white along the edges. Joan doesn’t take her eyes off of her as she hurries down, careful to step around her. She doesn’t look back.

“Moran!” she yells. The guns haven’t stopped, but now that she’s thinking straight, she can tell that they’re being fired from outside, directed at the back door, where they came in, and the front foyer. No one has breached the house yet, except for the woman she left behind.

She finds Moran and Violet crouched in the dining room, off to the side of the front entrance, a table dropped down as a barrier. She jumps over it quickly, when there is a pause in the bullets. “Any idea how we’re getting out of here?” she asks, checking her bag. It’s fine. Still intact. She lets her fingertips brush the pocket the recorder is tucked in before swinging it back onto her back.

“We don’t,” Moran grits out. “You do.”

Joan looks at him, confused, and is horrified to see that his shirt is covered in blood. Violet is huddled next to him, tears streaming down her face, pressing a blanket to his belly. 

“Moran, what happened?” she asks urgently, pulling her bag off her back again so she can yank her flannel shirt off. She shoves it at Violet. “Tear that into strips,” she commands.

“Got shot, didn’t I?” Moran grunts, grinning at her a little. His teeth are stained with blood. It scares her, in a completely new way. She can’t tell if the blood is from an injury in his mouth or something worse.

“Well, why did you do that?” she asks, taking the strips from Violet. Joan gently lifts the blanket away from Moran’s torso and tries to hide her grimace. There’s blood everywhere. “This will hurt,” she warns, and pulls the soaked tank top away from his bullet hole.

He hisses and bats at her hand. “Stop it, Watson.”

She ignores him. “I told you it would hurt,” she murmurs, trying to find the source of the bleeding through the blood. She probes carefully and, finally, sees it. It’s not a true gut shot, but it’s close enough that if she were in her hospital, she’d be barking orders at nurses as fast as she could. He still has a chance, but they need a hospital. Now.

“ _Joan. Stop._ ”

She stops.

Moran takes her hands in his, oddly gentle. “My road’s run, love,” he says. Next to him, Violet sobs. 

“No,” she says stubbornly.

“Yes. I’ve seen wounds like this. I don’t walk away from this.”

“I’ve seen wounds like this too. I’ve saved people from wounds like this,” Joan says, and tries to shake him off. She can’t manage it.

“Not this time,” he says. His voice is soft. “You need to go.”

“Moran-”

“Don’t argue, pet. You have the drive Kensington gave you? And whatever that bloke upstairs had? Take it and bring Moriarty down. Do what the rest of us couldn’t,” he says.

She looks down at her hands, still encased in his, both covered in blood. They’re shaking. His aren’t.

“There are… there are people-” she starts to say around numb lips.

“We took this room for a reason. There is a servant’s door behind us, which goes down into a cellar. We’ll distract them while you go out the cellar exit,” Moran says. He’s calm, his voice strong and steady.

Joan blinks away tears. “‘We’?”

Violet smiles at her regretfully. “I’m not leaving my brother. I’m sorry, Joan. You’ll need to do this last part alone.”

“I can’t do this alone,” she manages, her throat too tight, her vision blurry.

“You’ll have to,” Moran says, a definitive note in his voice. “Now _go_. They’re getting ready to breach.”

Joan pulls her backpack on one final time, and checks to make sure she still has the flash drive, the recording device, her phone. Everything is secure. She takes a deep breath, trying to push the tears away. She can do this. She’s ready.

She starts to stand. Moran’s hand darts out and grabs hers. “Joan,” he says hoarsely. “Thank you. For everything.”

“Violet, get him out of here and get him to hospital,” she orders, not taking her eyes off Moran. “I’ll see you both soon. We all know where this ends.”

Then she goes, the sound of a door being splintered nearby the last thing she hears before escapes.

******  
Joan runs for a long time.

She prepared for this, on some level, when she was still just a prisoner and Moran was still her enemy. She ran on her treadmill, imagining Moriarty behind her, pursuing her relentlessly. Of course, back then she imagined she would be running without anyone by her side by choice, rather than out of necessity.

She almost cries for at least the first mile, and then tells herself that she’s wasting valuable energy by holding back tears, and instead resolves not to cry.

She runs until she can’t anymore. After that, she takes a taxi- not the first or second, or even the third, but the ninth, because she doesn’t have Moran by her side with his readiness for violence, or Violet with her willingness to flirt her way through anything. She takes the taxi until the driver complains, and then she gets out and runs again. She stops long enough to send one text message, and goes again.

She does this for close to a week. She doesn’t stay in any hotels. She sleeps under trees, in fields, in barns and in unlocked storm cellars. There are no cameras in the country, and she takes her time, wandering, letting herself think, thinking too much. She doesn’t sleep most nights, thinking about what she lost, reminding herself that what she lost was never pure or good, and then remembering all the things she lost that _were_ good, if never pure, which just makes it harder to sleep. She steals food and feels bad about it, but she can’t access any of her accounts now and Moran had the cash they carried. She drinks water from creeks and hopes like hell that she doesn’t get a parasite. 

But she’s in the United Kingdom, and there’s only so far one can run before they need to find an airport.

It all ends in New York anyway.

******  
It is almost freeing, to no longer be hiding. Joan doesn’t flaunt herself in front of cameras, exactly, but stepping onto the airplane doesn’t terrify her the way it used to. She uses fake accounts, of course, and she gets extensions from a cheap salon to change her appearance once again, but she doesn’t _care_ if Moriarty finds her. 

On the flight, she buys a wifi connection and sets up her laptop. She inserts the flash drive from Kensington and begins digging through files. Then she uploads the recordings Jimmy gave her to the laptop, plugging in earbuds and listening to as many audio files as possible. She commits as much to memory as she can. It’s easier now than it used to be. She hasn’t been able to keep things for reference in over a year, which lent itself well to expanding her brain attic, as it were. Once she’s done reading, she sends a few emails. 

She sends more than a _few_ emails.

Then Joan closes her laptop and her eyes and forces herself to breathe.

She has begun a _yose_ , the endgame, and soon Moriarty will know it.

******  
When she lands in New York, Joan works fast. She only has an hour or two, if that.

She ignores all the cabs outside of the airport, opting to walk instead. She’d prefer to do this on her home territory, but she’s been gone so long that her home territory isn’t really home anymore. So closer to the airport will do. She digs out her phone from her backpack and does a quick search for what she’s looking for. When she finds it, she walks over to the nearest CCTV and holds the phone screen up to it. She waits a few seconds, then brings it back down, lifting her hand toward the camera, one finger up.

Moriarty is smart. She’ll be able to figure it out.

She keeps walking, only pausing long enough to secure the flash drive and the recorder with Jimmy’s information in a secret spot known to only two people, herself one of them, and to pick something up from the same spot. Along her walk, she carefully, with shaky breaths, pulls out the phone she’d sewn into her backpack before she ever escaped.

Back then, she’d kept it hidden because she was certain Moran would turn on her in an instant. It was her contingency plan, her panic button. She hadn’t anticipated Moran’s capability for and depth of loyalty, though, and so it had become almost an afterthought as she used whatever burners he handed her, the trust complete and confusing.

She doesn’t regret hanging onto it now, though, because it has a number she needs. She places one quick phone call, to a pretty blonde sex worker who offered to help her once, and then dials another number, the muscle memory still part of her. She wonders if she’ll answer, as it’s after midnight, but she needn’t have worried. The phone clicks, and there’s a confused, “Hello?”

“Mom,” she says. “I need your help.”

******  
When she walks into the warehouse she selected, Moriarty is already waiting for her.

She’s standing in the middle of the warehouse, wearing a very simple pantsuit in grey. She looks almost ordinary, almost like the hundreds of business executives that Joan encountered in her previous life, except that her eyes are coals. She wonders if there are snipers aiming their sights at her; she would be surprised if there were. Once, that would have been Moriarty’s strategy, when Joan was just a sidekick, a mascot. Only certain people warranted Moriarty’s personal intervention, and Joan wasn’t one of them. Now, though…

“Joan Watson, as I live and breathe,” Moriarty says without preamble. She has her hip cocked, her hand resting on it. She’s a picture of aggressive femininity, right down to her brilliant red lipstick, perfectly applied.

“Moriarty,” Joan says, adopting the same casual attitude as Moriarty. It’s almost easy, falling into this easy rhythm and pattern. She and Moriarty have always had a strange, demented connection. She has a brief memory of her pale white fingers moving pieces across a board, and for once, she doesn’t feel nervous or irritated while standing across from Moriarty. 

Joan will never be a dan like Mary Watson, but this is her moment. There has been joseki and a balance of territory and influence and there has been sacrifice and there has been seki, and now it’s time for death.

At this point, Joan doesn’t even mind if it’s hers.

“I was beginning to wonder if you were going to take advantage of Moran being… indisposed. If I was going to have to begin to act on my promise. You certainly took long enough to get here,” Moriarty says.

“I panicked,” Joan says easily. Neither she nor Moriarty have blinked yet. “I was certain you would find me, without Moran keeping me away from cameras. When it became clear you weren’t coming for me, I realized I would have to come to you.”

Moriarty nods slowly and finally blinks. Her blond hair isn’t in nearly as crisp a style as it used to be. Moriarty looks more like her cousin- her hair is greasy and dull, there are shadows beneath her eyes that her concealer isn’t working hard enough to hide, and the line of her suit is slightly rumpled. “I see,” she says. Her face tightens. “Explain to me, then, given your captive status, how you came to be allowed to roam so freely in my house? I was quite surprised to see that on my feeds.”

Joan licks her lips and smiles bitterly. “I think you know better than anyone what a good hostage I make. I don’t even try to run.”

She knows it is a risk to play at being a good prisoner. Knowing that there were cameras in the house, it is possible that Moriarty figured it out, if she didn’t a long time ago. But she needs to hold onto the hope that Moriarty still doesn’t know. She has to hope that Moriarty still thinks of her as some sort of game, someone who can be broken down into math and probabilities and _known_ and _predicted_.

If Moriarty still thinks that, Joan can still surprise her.

Moriarty considers her for a long time. Joan knows exactly what she looks like. Tired, worn, haggard. Broken. She isn’t even pretending.

“That’s true,” Moriarty says, some vibrancy coming back into her voice. She smirks. “You know, for a while I thought you might fight back. You might show some of that legendary spark. But no, you wouldn’t risk lives. _Couldn’t_ risk lives. It’s a weakness, Joan, it really is. Feelings. Relationships. They make you weak.”

“I don’t agree,” Joan says. 

Moriarty laughs, tossing her head back. “That legendary stubbornness… I did miss it, Joan. But you have to admit, here you are, and here I am, and only one of us willing to walk into a prison.” She sounds almost apologetic, like a teacher pointing out a student’s flawed thinking.

“Right,” she agrees, her lips numb. She reaches behind her, into the waistband at the small of her back, and pulls out the gun she picked up earlier, pointing it at Moriarty. “Just not the one you think. And I’ll settle for unwilling.”

Moriarty’s smile freezes, but doesn’t leave her face. Joan wonders if she regrets not bringing any snipers. If she regrets being _so sure_ she knew Joan Watson.

“Why Joan,” Moriarty says, her tone low and smooth, “you surprise me.”

“I always have,” she replies, keeping the gun steady. It feels natural in her hand, in this moment.

“I will admit, I never thought you would dare risk Sherlock’s life like this,” Moriarty says, her eyes flicking around. “Careless, Joan. Careless. Or did you think I was lying?”

“I believe you. I also believe you won’t be able to actually act on your promises.”

Moriarty raises an eyebrow. “You’re awfully confident.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t.”

Moriarty rakes her eyes over Joan. Her lips are pursed, and Joan thinks she sees tension in her neck. For all that Moriarty is presenting confidence, Joan doesn’t think she actually feels it.

“How did you get away from Moran?” she asks, almost abruptly.

Joan’s stomach flutters against her ribs, but she doesn’t allow the confusion cross her face. She can’t imagine Moriarty still hasn’t put it together, and yet… “You know perfectly well that I didn’t _get away_ from him,” she replies.

There is a long moment of silence as Moriarty watches her, her head tilted slightly to the side. Comprehension spills into her eyes seconds later, and then they narrow, going dark with frustration and tightly controlled rage. 

“Tell me, how did you get Moran to work for you? I wasn’t prepared for that scenario,” Moriarty says, her voice taut. She begins walking slowly, circling around Joan. “You not following through with our agreement, that was something I thought a possibility, but I didn’t expect you to convert Moran.”

Joan stays where she is, but covers Moriarty with her gun. “Your premise is flawed. Moran didn’t work for me. We worked together.” She wills her voice not to crack.

“I had his sister. He knew what was at stake.” Moriarty is behind her now, her heels clicking against the concrete. It’s distracting, but she doesn’t flinch, turning to keep the sight pointed right at Moriarty’s chest. 

“We aren’t here to talk about Moran,” she says.

“No… what _are_ we here to talk about? You summoned me, if you’ll recall.”

Joan smiles faintly. “Who said I’m here to talk at all?”

The clack of Moriarty’s heels falters, for a half second, and then continues as she begins laughing lowly. “Are you really going to kill me, Joan?” she asks as comes back to her original place.

Joan doesn’t laugh. “As we speak, FBI, Interpol, MI5, MI6, CIA, and various local police departments are converging on all of your agents worldwide. I sent them emails, and half an hour ago, a… friend… took the hard copies to safety. Within an hour, your network will no longer exist. Your empire will have fallen. I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to let you know that it’s over.”

Moriarty smiles. “That’s not true.”

“Call Slaney. Or Duncan Ross. Or George Burnwell. Anybody. Call them all.”

Moriarty’s smile is frozen on her face as she pulls out her phone. She doesn’t take her eyes off Joan as she punches a number into it and lifts it up to her face. Joan smiles blandly, waiting for what she knows is coming. She keeps her gun pointed steadily at her in the meantime. 

Moriarty takes the phone away from her face and tries another number. And then another one. Joan watches as she dials through seven, eight, nine more numbers.

“Did you think I was lying?” Joan asks softly.

Moriarty puts away her phone, lips pursed. She smooths her pants over her thighs. “I see,” she says finally.

“No, you don’t,” says Joan. “You can’t see how I did it. All those months playing Go so you could figure me out, and you still failed. People aren’t games. That’s what you missed. _People aren’t games_. We aren’t pieces you can perfectly manipulate and move and predict. We aren’t games, and we aren’t math. We’re _people_. I’ve never forgotten that, and that’s why you lost, _Lillie_.” 

She isn’t sure what exactly cracks Moriarty’s composure, if it’s pointing out her failure or if it’s the use of her real name, but it works. She expects Moriarty to go for the gun in her coat, the one Joan can see disrupting the line of her suit. But she doesn’t. Instead she comes right at Joan, almost completely silent, hands extended for her throat. She wasn’t anticipating such a personal touch, and so she isn’t prepared for Moriarty getting into her space and pinning Joan’s arm, the one holding the gun, against her chest. In the distance, she hears sirens start up.

Joan forces herself to relax. She’s still in control. She knows how to handle this. She knows what to do. “I’ve won, Lillie. You hear that? They’re coming for you,” Joan hisses, getting in as close as she can to Moriarty. She snugs the gun in close to her, making sure Moriarty can’t get to the trigger. 

“You have won nothing,” Moriarty snarls, rearing back from Joan slightly, flecks of spit gathering at the corners of her mouth. “You _are_ nothing.”

Joan throws back her head and laughs. She can feel tears at the corners of her eyes. She’s almost done. “I am so much more than nothing. I’m the one that _solved you_.”

Moriarty dips suddenly, but Joan’s body knows this by now. She’s had practice, by now, enough practice against enemies that this moment almost feels anticlimactic. She made sure she was prepared. Moran made sure she was prepared. So when Moriarty dips, probably to unbalance Joan, Joan moves with her and slams her elbow into Moriarty’s jaw instead.

Moriarty staggers back, grabbing at the gun. Joan loses her grip, and it falls to the ground. She kicks it away before Moriarty can dive for it. Then she steps up and punches Moriarty across the face. The sirens are closer now. She only needs another minute. She can survive another minute. One more minute after two years is nothing. It doesn’t even matter what happens, in the end, as long as she can keep Moriarty focused on her for one more minute.

Joan punches her again, and a third time. This isn’t Moran’s training, but it’s familiar, and she easily dodges the punch that Moriarty aims at her. Moriarty’s nose is bleeding, and her teeth are stained with blood from a cut on her lip. Joan hits her again.

“I’m not going to jail, Joan. You’ll have to kill me or let me go,” Moriarty says, and lashes out with her fingernails. She gets Joan full in the face, her nails digging in and scratching her open. Joan hisses, but doesn’t lose the moment. She grabs Moriarty’s wrist before she can pull back, and pulls her around into a stranglehold. The sirens are so close, just a few more seconds…

“Do it, Joan,” Moriarty gasps.

“I only need to hold this long enough for the police to arrive,” Joan says through numb lips. “They’ll be here any second.”

“Do you really trust the justice system? I evaded it before. I will do it again. And then the past year will have been in vain. A year of fear and exhaustion and always having to look over your shoulder… wasted. For what? Your mother will never trust you again. Do you think she’ll be able to look you in the eye after this? And Sherlock…” 

Involuntarily, Joan tightens her grip. Moriarty’s hands scrabble at her elbow.

“I know you know how to do it. Moran would have taught you, before I had him gunned down.”

He did, once, try to show her how to execute a stranglehold. He wasn’t the first person to show her. He was pleased she already knew.

Joan closes her eyes. She adjusts her grip, just slightly, to increase the pressure on the carotid. It’s all anatomy. When she learned this the first time, it came naturally to her. It was all a matter of angles and pressure and applied knowledge. It was easy.

This would be easy. And she wants to do it.

God, she wants to do it.

She lets go.

“Coward,” Moriarty spits, her voice hoarse. She staggers a few steps away, her hands coming up to touch her throat.

“The police are just outside,” Joan says. She steps away from Moriarty, rubbing her hands on her jeans. “I’m not going to become a killer. You lose. _Again_.”

Later, she’ll wonder if Moriarty was holding back during their fight, because when she moves this time, towards the gun, it’s so fast that Joan doesn’t have time to react. Moriarty scoops the gun up off the ground, and Joan looks for cover, but there is none, and Moriarty raises the gun, and Joan breathes out and closes her eyes. Her minute is up.

She is at peace with everything she has done up to this moment.

The gunshot doesn’t sound right. She knows what different caliber guns sound like, and the shot sounds wrong, not at all like it came from her small handgun. Joan opens her eyes in time to see Moriarty crumble to the ground, a perfectly executed headshot like a blemish on her forehead.

She blinks. Then spins around, terrified, her heart pumping even harder in her ears. She’s trying to calculate the possibilities- did Moriarty bring a sniper that defected at the last possible second? did her mother request SWAT? did Chloe somehow find out where she was going and call the police?- when she registers a red laser flashing on the floor in front of her. Flashing and blinking, repeatedly.

Not blinking.

Morse code.

It takes her a second, but she reads the message. _Take care. M._.

Joan looks up at where the shot came from, trying to pinpoint where he might be. The building across the street, maybe. She gives a watery, weak smile and places her hand to her forehead in a sloppy salute. She can imagine his irritation at that, a laugh bubbling up and dying almost immediately. “Thank you,” she mouths, knowing he’ll see it through the scope. 

The red laser appears at her feet, and taps out one more word.

_Always._

It flicks out then, and Joan knows that is the last she’ll ever hear from Moran. She’ll never find out how he survived, or if Violet is all right. She’ll never hear how they got to her. How they arrived in time to help her, just like they both promised they would, once.

She drops the salute and turns to greet the police as they rush into the warehouse, Moriarty’s body at her feet.

******  
Joan suffers through the chaos, the inevitable suspicion of the police who force her onto the ground and pat her down for weapons, who then pass her off to the EMTs, who take their time as they hook her up to various machines check the claw marks on her face, and wrap a blanket around her shoulders. She huddles into it, closing her eyes, letting the _beep_ of the heart monitors lull her into something that approaches calm. She can’t help herself, though; she snaps her eyes open every time she even begins to fall asleep, certain that Moriarty isn’t really dead, that someone else is coming for her.

She’s right, in a way.

She’s in the thirtieth such cycle of near drowsing followed by panicked alertness when she hears a woman yell, “Get out of the way! That’s my daughter! I’m the one who called you, you idiot!”

Joan smiles a little, and then tries to sit a little more upright on the gurney as her mother shoves aside the EMT right outside the ambulance and clambers in.

“Hi Mom,” she says, wincing at how pathetic it sounds.

Her mom flings herself at Joan, who just manages to avoid hitting her with a terrified punch. “Joan,” Mary murmurs into the side of her head, hugging her tightly. “Oh, my dear Joan.”

Joan lifts her arms up, careful of the various wires, and puts them around her mother. 

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly.

Mary pulls back. Her face is more worn now than it was a year ago. There is more gray in her hair, and she either hasn’t had the energy to dye it, or finally conceded the battle. It hurts Joan’s heart to see that, to know that she did that.

“Joan, are you hurt? Did she hurt you?” Mary asks urgently. 

She shakes her head. “No, Mom. No. I’m okay. I’m fine.”

“Look at this, look at your face. How did she do this? How? Oh, my Joan,” Mary says, and pulls her in for another hug. Joan feels a tightness around her eyes, but tears don’t come. She focuses instead on hugging her mother back as tightly as she can.

“Thank you,” she says softly.

Mary tries to pull away, but Joan tightens her grip, so she settles for saying into her neck, “For what?”

“For answering your phone,” she says tiredly.

This time, Mary manages to force herself away. She places her hand on Joan’s cheek, her eyes sad. “Of course I did,” Mary says tenderly. “You are my daughter.”

“You didn’t know it was me,” she points out, starting to list to the side.

Mary guides her so that she’s leaning back against the gurney again, her hands familiar and soft. “If you think I didn’t answer the phone every time a strange number appeared…”

“You thought I was dead,” Joan says, and she can feel her consciousness slipping. She’s going to pass out, and she doesn’t even care. She’s exhausted, and it’s done.

She’s done.

Mary smiles and brushes a few strands of hair out of her face. “No,” she says. “I never believed it. Not once.”

Joan can feel the questions bubbling up, but she can’t fight through the fog enough to ask them. She settles instead for allowing her mother to pull the blanket tighter around her, and closes her eyes.

Dimly, she hears her mother say, “Sherlock, you can’t. Not yet,” but she pays no attention to it and lets herself float away and disappear.

******  
The beeping of the heart monitor is what wakes her.

It’s an almost Pavlovian response. She was always able to fall asleep just about anywhere when she was a resident, when she was on call, when she was a surgeon- unless she could hear a heart monitor. There was something about the beeping responsibility that always kept her alert, kept her focused. And now it drags her back from unconsciousness, nagging at her to be a better daughter. Once it penetrates the darkness, she jolts awake, eyes flying open and hands flying up.

“It’s all right!” her mother says, out of sight. A moment later, her mother is there, catching her fists and gently prying them apart until they become hands and fingers again. “You’re all right. I’m here.”

Joan’s breath catches in her throat, but she quickly sorts herself out. Moriarty is dead. She is alive. It’s all over. There is nothing left to do.

“Sorry,” she says, and lowers her hands to the covers.

She’s in a private room, and wearing a hospital gown. There are bandages on her face, and her feet are cold. If she needed to run now, she’d have trouble getting away without attention. People would notice her. There are probably cameras in the hallway.

Her skin itches.

Mary sits down on her bedside, putting her hands on her thighs. “You were asleep a very long time,” she says, her voice soft.

By now, anyone who escaped the tightening police forces around the world knows that Joan Watson brought down Moriarty’s empire. There are probably people coming for her. She glances at the door.

“I was beginning to worry, but the doctors assured me that it is normal for someone who has suff- survived as much as you- well. They told me it was normal,” Mary continues.

Joan curls her toes, trying to get her circulation moving. “How long?” she asks abruptly, and jerks her eyes down to her mother’s hands, knowing the last time she asked that it was in very different circumstances.

She can feel her mother’s disappointment. “Nearly twenty-six hours,” she says.

A pit lodges in her stomach. Twenty-six hours isn’t as bad as last time, but last time she was secure in the knowledge that everyone thought that Moran was the driving force in what was happening. She doesn’t have that luxury now.

“I need pants,” she says, her voice taut. She probably sounds odd, to her mother.

“You don’t need pants,” Mary says, suddenly firm even if her eyes look sad. She hates it when she makes her mother look sad.

“I need pants. I can’t- I won’t- I’m in a _hospital gown_.”

Mary closes her eyes, lines on her face suddenly in stark relief. When she opens her eyes again, they’re glittering. “You don’t need pants. You’re safe. Patients wear hospital gowns, and you are a patient.”

Joan clenches her fists in frustration. She sees shadows in the hallway, but no one walks into her room. They’re waiting. There is someone waiting. Her mom is in the room. She licks her lips. “Mom. This is really important. I need pants. Or shorts, or something. Just. Can you do that, for me?”

Mary takes a deep breath, straightening her shoulders. “Joan-”

“Mom. Can you do that for me?”

They lock eyes for a long time, the air tense. Joan’s gut roils as she watches the shadows outside her door flicker. Someone keeps walking by her door. Someone is waiting for her.

Mary eventually crumbles. It surprises her, a little. She has never really won a fight with her mother. They’ve had stalemates in the past, but she’s never _won_. “Very well,” Mary says, and stands up. She walks over to a duffel bag that is sitting on a chair. It looks familiar to her. It takes a moment before she recognizes it as her gym bag, the one she kept at-

Her mother hands her a pair of running shorts. They’re worn, the fabric soft under her fingertips. They’re hers, from years ago. She has a brief flash of a memory, of headphones and irritation and-

She shuts it all down and wiggles into them. They hang loose around her hips, her thighs wallowing in the fabric. It doesn’t solve the problem of the hospital gown, but she can fix that later. “Thank you,” she says, and swings her legs over the edge of the bed.

“What are you doing?” Mary asks, alarmed. She takes a step forward, but Joan shakes her head.

“I don’t want to scare you, Mom, but there are people outside of this room. I can see them walking back and forth in front of the door. They are probably Moriarty’s people. It’s okay. I will get you out of this safely,” Joan says, easing herself down to the ground. She looks at the machine next to her bed, looking for what she needs to turn it off so it won’t make any noise when she pulls off the heart monitor and removes the IV.

Mary sags against the chair. Joan understands. Once, she felt that way about Moriarty and her empire. It was a long time ago, though.

“Joan…” Mary says, her voice small.

“It’s okay, Mom. I’m going to protect you,” she says, and goes through the process of turning the machine off. It’s a newer version, but still intuitive; her fingers still remember. Muscle memory kicks in enough to turn off the drip and slide out the IV needle, her arm coming up to staunch the blood flow. 

“Joanie, please.”

“I’m going to need you to be quiet now, okay?” Joan says, dropping her voice down as she carefully pads across the floor. It’s cool beneath her feet, the tile slightly grimy. She hates the feeling, but she knows the hospital slippers would create traction problems.

She feels her mother behind her, and then she’s being spun around with far more force than she would have expected from her elderly mother. Her mother’s hands come up and clap her on either side of the face, pulling her close. “Joanie, you are safe. There is no one out there except for trusted police officers and Sherlock. You’re safe, Joan. She’s gone. You won. You _won_.”

The world swims for a moment. “He’s here?” she asks hoarsely, the muscles in her legs quivering.

“Yes,” Mary says, her eyes brightening. “Would you like to see him?”

The earth shakes beneath Joan’s feet. She can’t remember the last time she even thought his name, let alone said it aloud. It wasn’t safe. She brings her teeth together, wanting to make the _shhh_ sound. But she can’t. She licks her lips and tries again, but her teeth shy away from the sound.

There is danger in saying his name.

It didn’t used to scare her.

“Joan? Would you like to see him?”

The earth that was shaking rises up and devours her. She hears her mother shouting, but she never feels herself hit the ground.

******  
For the next ten days, the only people Joan sees are doctors, nurses, and her mother, who never leaves her bedside. There is the ubiquitous therapist, who sits by her and talks about depression and anxiety and PTSD, as though Joan has never sat through medical school, as though she’s never suffered trauma. Joan listens to the well-meaning therapist as he explains the hippocampus, and veterans, and hypervigilance, and treatment options, and she nods and nods and nods while watching the door and the windows, wondering how many cameras are in this particular hospital.

On day four, they bring in a psychiatrist and start sending her to sessions. Joan stares at them for an hour, silent, each day before they stop trying on day nine. For a fleeting second, she feels a sort of sympathy and camaraderie with her previous clients, who always fought her in the beginning. She thinks she understands them a little better, now.

On day seven, she gets a note from Gregson. Jimmy Moriarty is alive, though barely, and is being taken care of at a hospital in England. There is no sign of Godfrey Norton.

On day eleven, her mother says, quietly, “Sherlock is here. Do you think you’re ready to see him? He misses you,” and part of her aches so fiercely that she finds herself saying, “Yes,” before she can cut her tongue off.

When he walks in, her first thought is how _small_ he looks. Moran was always so big beside her, and he always ate up all the air in the room, even when he made himself smaller around her and his sister. _He_ is just small. His cheekbones are sharp, as is his pisiform, poking out from his sleeve. She can’t make eye contact for more than a second, but she can see how deeply sunken his eyes are. 

“Watson,” he says roughly, and it becomes difficult to breathe. Her head imagines that with a different inflection, a working class accent, and it wars with the part of her that remembers it always sounding exactly like _that_. There are two voices in her head, battling, and she doesn’t know who she wants to win.

“Hi,” she says, because she still can’t make herself say his name. Whenever she tries, she sees snipers and a body before her feet.

His Adam’s apple jumps as he swallows. He stays several feet from her bed. That’s good. She thinks she might jump out a window if he came closer. That’s bad. All she wants to do is run her hands over him, check that he’s whole and safe.

She feels nauseated.

“I am- glad. To see you.”

It’s awkward.

It was never this awkward before.

“Were you Thelxinoe12?” she asks instead.

He blinks, his eyelashes fluttering rapidly. “I- no. And yes, eventually. It was a joint effort.”

Joan puts it together, allowing herself the puzzle pieces that she always forbad herself before. “You. Ms. Hudson.”

“And me,” her mother says from where she’s standing in the corner.

“I couldn’t… it wasn’t safe for me to be too involved. But your mother, she knew. Strange things happen at the one-two points,” he says weakly. He’s too pale. Moran was always ruddy.

She focuses on her hands, watching as they clench into her palms. She can’t feel them, even though she’s sure there is pain. “Oh.”

She hears his footsteps approach, too quick, and she jerks herself away before he can touch her hand. He freezes, eyes wide. They stare at each other for a long time. His eyes are bloodshot, but they’re as beautiful as ever. She always loved his eyes. They could never lie to her.

“I apologize,” he says stiffly, and retreats to a distance that doesn’t make her heart pound. The distance doesn’t make her heart slow down.

She wants him to touch her hand.

If he touches her, she will die.

She feels sick.

“I’m Irene,” she says, without giving her mouth permission to speak. The words are bitter, but they’re also true.

He looks at her, stricken. “I’m sorry?” he asks, voice barely more than a whisper.

“Oh God,” she says. “She won after all. I’m Irene.”

She lowers her head, and even if she can’t cry, every part of her wants to do so. She knew, intellectually, that even if she survived she would be hurt by all she had to do. But to see him, and to recoil- it reminds her of the woman she thought was Irene, once upon a time. Scared, confused, sick.

Moriarty is dead, but she won.

The hand that grabs hers is calloused and strong, and she jerks away. But she looks up, and he… _Sherlock_ … is staring at her, his eyes fierce. “Irene won,” he says, his voice harsh. “Irene _won_ , Watson. Irene saw the chaos and she left it all behind her. You will win, too.”

She wants to argue that Irene was nothing more than a face that Moriarty wore, but she wants to grasp the thin tendril of hope he’s offering her, so she nods. “Irene won,” she echoes.

“You’ll win.”

She can’t quite bring herself to agree, so she nods instead. It will do, for the moment.

******  
On day fourteen, Joan checks herself out.

The cuts on her face from Moriarty are scabbed over, and the bruises are more green than black. She still can barely look Sherlock in the eye, and the only person she can tolerate for more than ten minutes is her mother, but she can’t deal with being in the hospital for a moment longer. She plans to stay with her mother, but as she’s packing her meager items, her mother inhales deeply and says, “I think you should go back to the brownstone. With Sherlock.”

Joan’s stomach shakes, but she’s better at controlling it now. She looks up and raises her eyebrow at her mother. “Why?”

Mary purses her lips. “I don’t think you’ll get better with me.”

She rolls her eyes and sighs. “I’m fine, Mom.”

“Joan.”

“I’m _fine._ >”

“You haven’t allowed any visitors other than myself and Sherlock. And even he, only three times. You aren’t okay. If you stay with me, you will remain comfortable, you will not be forced to stretch yourself, because I will not stretch you. I can’t. I love you, and I cannot make you suffer, even if it will help you in the end. But if you go to the brownstone, I think you could get better.”

She looks at the shorts she’s holding in her hands. Some distant part of her knows her mother is right. After all, there is nothing that has ever pushed her so much as living at the brownstone. But she wants to go to her mother’s house, lay down in her guest bedroom, and not move for seven years. When she thinks about just closing her eyes and letting herself do nothing until she finally dies, she aches with longing.

“Fine,” she says abruptly. “I’ll go stay at the brownstone.”

The longing to stop moving terrifies her.

******  
Her mother hails a cab, and they ride to the brownstone in silence. She keeps her eyes down, staring at the bag on her lap, and her shoulders hunched. It’s only as they’re pulling up that she remembers- she doesn’t have to act like a prisoner anymore. She’s free. She can make eye contact, she can smile, she can talk without having to measure every word.

“Are you coming inside?” Joan asks, throwing her duffel bag over her shoulder and staring at the brownstone. It looks like it does in her memories, which doesn’t make sense. Last time she was here, it was on fire.

Her mother shakes her head sadly. “I’m sorry, Joan. I have a doctor’s appointment that I can’t reschedule. Sherlock is here and will help you get settled.”

As if on cue, the door opens and Sherlock steps out. His shirt is buttoned all the way up, and he’s bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, hands flexing at his sides. _He’s nervous_ , her brain whispers at her, some long hidden part of herself still remembering the way he communicates, all nervous tics and obfuscation. She didn’t know if she could still read him, after a year’s separation. But she can. She looks at him, up on the stoop, and sees a strange reflection of herself. Skittish and wounded and trying anyway.

She wonders if he still doesn’t have any mirrors in the brownstone.

“It’s okay, Mom,” she says, realizing she’s been silent for too long. She pats her mom on the hand, and then gives her a swift kiss on the cheek. “We’ve lived together before. It’s an old routine.”

Her mom purses her lips, and her hand lingers on Joan’s for a moment longer even after Joan has opened the cab door. “Call me,” she says. “I’ll be by tomorrow.”

She waves at her mom as the cab pulls away from the curb, and then turns to look back at the brownstone. Sherlock is still standing on the stoop, watching her. Even from where she’s standing, she can see his Adam’s apple doing jumping jacks. She swallows around the sudden tightness in her throat and forces her legs to move towards the brownstone, up the stairs, and to stand right in front of Sherlock.

“Hi,” she says. She makes herself hold eye contact. She can do that, now. She looks at Sherlock, in the sunlight, standing in front of the brownstone, and the world does not end.

It will not end.

“Welcome back,” he says brusquely, his voice rough, and steps to the side, gesturing abruptly towards the doorway. She tightens her hand around the duffel bag strap, smiles as best she can at Sherlock, and goes inside.

The brownstone doesn’t look at all different. 

She doesn’t just mean paint colors or furniture layout. Sherlock occasionally messes with those, but though he’d loathe to admit it, he’s largely a creature of habit, and everything always returns to how he had it. So she isn’t surprised to see the armchairs, the bookshelves, and a peek of padlocks in the next room. What startles her is that her other coat, the one she didn’t grab that night, is still on the coat hooks, her boots laying carelessly on their sides. Her scarf is draped where she left it. She stares at it, unable to look away.

Behind her, Sherlock clears her throat. “I. I didn’t want to – in case you came back. In case – in case it wasn’t real.”

Carefully, Joan reaches out and pulls her scarf from the hook and holds it up to her nose. It still smells faintly of tea, the kind that Sherlock would make for her in those last few days of their last case, when her mind was whirling and she couldn’t concentrate on anything except the files in front of her and the sense that she was running out of time.

For a brief moment, her eyes well with tears. For a heartbeat, Joan thinks she might finally cry. But though the burning sensation remains, the tears disappear, and she’s left nodding. “Thank you,” she says.

Sherlock moves around where she can see him. His face is tight, a line in his jaw jumping occasionally. His eyes are fixed on her, like he can’t get enough of looking at her. She looks away.

“Of course,” he says softly. He reaches out a hand towards her elbow, but when she jerks, he freezes. “Can I take your bag?”

Right. Her bag.

She hands it to him, figuring it will give him something to do. He starts up the stairs, presumably towards her bedroom, but she doesn’t follow. She wants to explore the rest of the brownstone. She wants to remember her home, rediscover it. She wants the thudding in her ears to stop, wants her palms to stop sweating, wants to act like herself again, the way she remembers herself, not this pale imitation.

Joan pushes the thoughts out of her head and focuses on looking around, refamiliarizing herself with the velvety feel of the chairs, the acid-stained woods, the dusty books, the slightly metallic scent of the padlocks. She stares at those for a while, remembering when picking locks was something difficult, something that took time. Now she thinks she could beat Sherlock in a race.

She can hear Sherlock thumping around upstairs, so she heads down. She wonders if he still sleeps on the couch, rather than the bed he only bought to appease her; she wonders if his sheets are the same from the day she left, if they still smell like smoke and sweat and an ending.

She doesn’t make it to his room.

At the bottom of the stairs, Joan looks into their kitchen, and her stomach turns to stone. She feels like she’s sleepwalking as she enters, her mind disappearing into static. It’s the same. It’s the same as the place where she was kept, with Moran, for all those months. On autopilot, she opens the cupboard and sees the same brands of cereal that were in her jail, the same brand of milk. She opens the crisper, and there is bok choy, admittedly long gone brown and sludgy.

_I was going to make a nice dinner for Sherlock and I with that,_ she thinks to herself as her chest goes tight and spots start to appear at the corners of her eyes. She made herself a meal from the bok choy, she remembers. She ate it while ignoring Moran. It tasted bad, she hadn’t been paying attention, and it turned out wrong, and why is the bok choy _here_ , _now_? 

She isn’t breathing right, she knows, but she can’t make herself breathe correctly. Panic attack, she knows, but knowing doesn’t make it _stop_.

Frantically, Joan turns and starts opening the other cupboards. They’re different than her prison, still laid out the way they were when she left, not in the way she changed them back at the other place. The British voice she hears calling for her is posher, not rough, and the footsteps are right, not wrong. Clyde is somewhere in the brownstone, and she can go into any room she wants, and she can have any materials, books, newspapers – anything she wants, it is hers. She doesn’t even have to ask.

This is her home. Or it was, once. It can be hers again.

Sherlock finds her clutching a spatula, sitting at the kitchen table and breathing too quickly. He’s by her side in an instant, hovering, hands reaching out but not quite touching. “Watson?” he asks softly.

“I want it in this one,” she says, choking slightly, pointing at a drawer she’s never kept a spatula in before. She needs it to be there. It isn’t the right drawer, but she needs it to be there.

Sherlock blinks at her, clearly taken aback, but nods, still hovering but not touching. “Of course,” he says. “Of course. Wherever you want it.”

She stands up and walks jerkily over to the drawer and puts it inside. It doesn’t look right, but it looks perfect. Exactly where it should be, and completely out of place.

Her head hurts.

“Watson…” Sherlock says, behind her now. “Did… was wherever you were kept, did – what did it – did you -”

“It looked like the brownstone,” she says, interrupting his clumsy attempts to find words. “Moriarty made the place look like the brownstone, as much as she could. The kitchen and – and my bedroom. Were particularly good replicas.” She manages to get the words out without choking on them, this time, and her chest doesn’t hurt as much anymore.

When she turns around, Sherlock’s eyes are wide, and she feels a rush of revulsion and anger so intense that it takes her by surprise. She doesn’t want his _pity_. She opens her mouth, preparing to yell at him for looking so sad and lost when it’s _her_ that should look that way, and she _doesn’t_ , so he can stop – 

But he simply nods once and says, “There are other rooms in the brownstone that are completely empty. Would you like to try your old bedroom, or do you want a new one?”

It stops the anger cold.

A choice. She has a choice.

He’s giving her back her choices.

Joan finds her words stuck, her panic slowly receding. When she doesn’t say anything right away, Sherlock nods and says, “When you’re ready, I’ll be upstairs,” and simply turns and walks away.

She stares at the space he left behind for quite a while.

******  
She moves into another bedroom, but keeps her original one the way it was. In case. For when things are better, and her mind more settled, and everything a little less fresh.

Sherlock buys a bed for her new bedroom without a word.

******  
“How did Thelxinoe12 happen?” Joan asks abruptly, about two weeks after returning to the brownstone. She hasn’t left since then, preferring to stay in and watch TV, or change the arrangement of her room, or read. She sleeps a lot. She showers a lot. Sometimes she takes baths. She couldn’t take baths when they were on the run. Too vulnerable. Too easy to get stuck in a bad position. 

Sherlock looks up from whatever he’s taking apart, his jeweler’s glass making one eye look comedically large. “Pardon?” he says.

Joan sets down her book and stretches her legs out on the couch. She painted her toenails last night. Red. She stares at them as she says, “Thelxinoe12. You said it was a joint effort, between you, my mom, and Ms. Hudson. How did that happen? That’s not… normal.”

He makes a humming sound and takes out the jeweler’s glass. “It was Ms. Hudson’s idea, actually. She thought, where better to look for a dead woman, than among crowds of people who never believe a simple death?”

She nods. It makes sense. “I can see her talking you into it. But my mom?”

Sherlock gives her a small smile. “It was your mother who insisted you were still alive. She was the one who convinced us to look.”

Joan stares at him, tearing her eyes away from her toes. She had never really thought about what their lives were like, when she first ‘died’. She imagined grief and sadness, but. Did she have a funeral? A memorial service? Who actually identified her body at the morgue? Was it Sherlock, like she imagined, or was it her mother? Or Gregson, or Bell, or someone else entirely? Did her mother pack away the things she still had? Did Oren put away her photographs, too hurt to look at them?

It occurs to her that she only knows one side of the entire story.

She swallows. “Why did… you thought I was dead? But my mom didn’t?”

Sherlock stands and walks towards the sofa. Slowly, she pulls her legs up, allowing him the sofa cushion at the other end. He takes her invitation for what it is and sits down, folding his hands neatly in his lap. “I was convinced you were alive,” Sherlock says, not looking at her, his eyes on a fixed point across the room. “I was looking for you, tearing apart the criminal underworld, as you know I am wont to do when… distressed.”

Joan nods. She has seen it before. She supposes she expected that, on some level.

“And then I received a phone call, from Hawes. He had a body that he needed me to look at.”

“So you went to the morgue and saw my body,” she says, her tone too flat.

Sherlock nods, still not looking at her. “I did. It was… it was very convincing, Watson. Moriarty never did things half way. The scars, the birth marks, the freckles… it was all there. And I suppose part of me expected to find a body, not a living person.”

Joan can picture it. She pictured it before. It’s the next part that she never thought through. “Did you identify my body, or did my mom?”

“I did,” Sherlock says. He gives her a look out of the side of his eye. “I couldn’t do that to Mary.”

She nods. She doesn’t think her mother would have been able to tell the difference, if Sherlock couldn’t. “And then?”

“I went to tell her. And when I did… I did not expect her to take it well. But she looked at me and said, ‘my daughter is not dead. That woman would not simply kill her.’”

“She wasn’t wrong,” she says reflectively. She didn’t realize her mom had paid enough attention to Moriarty to understand her psychology.

“I know,” Sherlock says softly. “She kept insisting, you see, that Moriarty did not kill her rivals; she adopted them, obsessed over them, became convinced that she could turn them to her side. As she did with me, once. And Mary thought the same must have happened to you.”

Joan nods, looking back at her toes. She wants to paint them again. Something other than red. Red is death. She wants something victorious, something full of life. Green, maybe, or purple.

“I thought she was in denial. I said as much to Ms. Hudson, when she came by to see how I was doing. And she… she took it from there. Said they were going to find you, and they’d do so by looking at people who live in denial every day. That we couldn’t have any doubts.”

“How did you manage the account?” she asks. She’ll ask about if she had a funeral later. She’ll ask if Sherlock ever found out who the poor dead girl really was later.

“That was really all Ms. Hudson. I couldn’t be seen looking at the forums, in case Moriarty figured out what I was doing. So Ms. Hudson and Mary determined what they should post, and Ms. Hudson would do the actual posting. I would review whatever information they thought worthy.”

In two weeks, Joan has largely avoided Sherlock when possible. They’ve had a few stilted, awkward conversations, largely around the mundane routines of life – what to get at the grocery store, which bathroom is out of toilet paper, whose turn it is to feed Clyde. She’s barely made eye contact with him, still not entirely convinced it’s safe to do so, that he won’t get shot before her eyes or simply disappear, the product of a broken brain.

But he looks sad. And she feels sad. And she doesn’t want them to be sad forever. 

She stretches out her leg and gently nudges him in the leg with her big toe. It’s the first time she’s touched him in two weeks. The first time _she’s_ touched _him_ in a year. He’s reassuringly solid. “Hey,” she says, and when he looks at her, when they make eye contact, she gives him a small smile. “Thanks.”

He smiles back, his eyes crinkling in the corners. “Of course.”

******  
“Watson. Bell called and has requested that I come take a look at some files for him. Would you like to accompany me?”

Joan is in her bedroom, reading, when Sherlock walks in and starts a conversation, just like he used to do. She looks over her book at him. This bedroom is arranged differently, her bed set up so she can see the door, her back against a wall. She doesn’t even have to move to look at him. His hand is flexing rapidly by his leg, and he isn’t actually looking at her, his eyes fixed on her nightstand lamp.

“I’m good,” she says, and looks back down at her book. It’s a Zadie Smith, one that came out while she was on the run. She doesn’t want to put it down.

Sherlock clears his throat. “Watson. You have not left the brownstone since you moved back in.”

She shrugs, turning a page. “So?”

“So that was four weeks ago.”

Joan thinks about it. She supposes that’s true. The world outside of the brownstone hasn’t really been of interest to her. It’s too loud in New York City, and there is too much happening. And she’s been tired, catching up on sleep. “I’ve been tired,” she says dismissively, and turns another page. She hasn’t read the last three chapters, but she figures that maybe if she keeps turning the page, she’ll manage to finish something.

Holmes goes silent, long enough that Joan thinks he’s left until he abruptly says, “I think you should join a support group.”

_That_ gets her to put down her book. “Really? Now you’re a support group advocate?” she asks sarcastically, folding her arms over her chest.

He’s bouncing now. Next he’ll start stammering. “I – I admit, Watson, that perhaps I was not an enthusiast when I first met you. But even you must acknowledge that I made great strides in those meetings, and I have never stopped attending. Not even while you were… gone.”

“I don’t need therapy,” she says flatly, wanting the conversation to be over.

“You used to have a therapist,” he points out. 

She sighs. “It was required. To be a sober companion. And also? My having had a therapist before means that I have enough experience to know that I don’t need a therapist now.”

“Then go for a walk with me,” he shoots back, clearly unwilling to give any ground.

She throws her hands up in the arm, her book sliding off her thighs. “Fine! Fine, if it will get you to leave me alone!”

He beams at her, ignoring her irritation entirely. “Very good. I’ll get your coat.”

She rolls her eyes, and he disappears from her door as she drags herself into a fully sitting position, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Her shoes are already on; she doesn’t take them off, just in case – well. Just in case. She grabs her keys, lacing them between her fingers, and wishes she had a taser or something. She doesn’t know where her singlestick is, and Sherlock doesn’t carry protection with him as often as he should.

_It’s just a walk_ her brain whispers, and she shakes her head, the fog lifting from her brain. It’s _just_ a walk. Slowly, with more difficulty than it really warrants, she releases her keys. She doesn’t need a weapon. She doesn’t need to wonder where her singlestick is. She doesn’t need to worry. They’re just going for a walk. Around the block, probably. Just a quick walk.

Sherlock finds her where he left her ten minutes later, in the middle of another panic attack. He walks over swiftly, but he’s learned by now not to touch her, so he simply sits down next to her. “Watson,” he says. “You’re all right.”

She nods, trying to get her breathing under control. This is the routine now. Something reminds her, a little too viscerally, of her time away, and she panics, and Sherlock waits it out with her. She _hates_ this routine. She doesn’t want it to be a _routine_.

“I hate this,” she chokes out.

Sherlock makes a humming noise. “I know.” He looks at her out of the corner of his eye. “It won’t stop, though. Not without some help.”

She closes her eyes, feeling as though she’s going to cry. God, she wants to cry. “I’m too scared to leave,” she mumbles, ashamed. It’s the first time she’s allowed herself to think it, let alone say it out loud.

Sherlock gives her another look out of the corner of his eye. “Yes, I’d – I’d managed to deduce that.”

She snorts, immediately feeling calmer. Probably just as he intended. “Of course you did.”

“To be fair, it wasn’t the hardest deduction I’ve ever made. I’m sure you would have figured it out sooner, if you were feeling better. Now. Would you like to try to go for a walk? Or would it be best that I call Marcus and ask him to bring the files here? And maybe a pizza?”

Joan considers and shrugs one shoulder. “A pizza sounds good,” she says. 

He nods and pats his thighs before standing. “Excellent. And perhaps later we can discuss therapists. I am sure that there are people who do house calls. It’s a brave new world, Watson! Nothing can stop the train of good mental health!” 

His cheerfulness sounds a bit forced, a slightly manic, but it still makes her smile.

******  
“I don’t like her,” Joan declares.

Ms. Hudson stops her dusting long enough to raise an eyebrow at her. “Why not?”

Joan rolls her eyes and pulls her sweater across her chest before she folds her arms. “Because I’m lying to her and she doesn’t even know it.”

Therapy isn’t going well so far. She’s tried, she really has. She’s brought in four different therapists now to the brownstone, given them three sessions before making her decision, and none of them had made the cut. The first one was woefully out-of-date in their therapy techniques, the second one suggested that maybe she’d enjoyed being on the run and _that_ was why she was behaving the way she was – because, oh yes, PTSD was _absolutely_ a case of _missing_ the trauma, that made total sense – the third had recused himself after Joan made a few too many pointed observations about his marriage, and the fourth, well. The fourth has not yet picked up on the fact that Joan isn’t telling her the truth.

“Have you tried… not… lying to her?” Ms. Hudson asks, turning her back to Joan and returning to the dusting. Part of Joan’s requirement for therapy has been that she has a friend present in the brownstone, just in case, and today was Ms. Hudson’s day to clean anyway, so the timing had been perfect.

She sighs. “I don’t want to have a therapist who can’t tell that I’m hiding things. What if I’m lying to myself and I need someone to call me on it? How are they supposed to tell that I’m hiding things from myself if they can’t even tell that I’m hiding things from them?”

Ms. Hudson pauses again and turns. She looks thoughtful. “That’s a good point, actually.”

“I know,” Joan says, nodding. She might not be able to leave the brownstone or keep her shoes off or believe that being with her friends won’t get them killed, but she isn’t completely irrational.

“But she’s not getting a good baseline read on you if you’re just lying all the time,” Ms. Hudson points out, sitting down on the arm of a chair. She’s wearing a tight, fashionable pencil skirt, but she still manages to cross her legs without falling off. Joan can admire that in a woman. “You can’t start out treating your therapist as though they’re an enemy.”

“I haven’t!” Joan protests.

Ms. Hudson folds her arms. “You haven’t? Then tell me, why did the third one go running out here like his heels were on fire? Didn’t you say something along the lines of ‘you’re cheating on your wife, with a man, so maybe you’re the one who needs to admit certain truths to themselves’?”

Joan gasps and glares at her. “You were listening!”

“Well, it was an accident,” Ms. Hudson says, and she at least has the grace to look apologetic. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you drove that man out of the room. Not your problems. You. Hell, not even _his_ problems – plenty of successful therapists are philanderers.”

“The second one thought I _missed_ being on the run from Moriarty. Said I had an adrenaline addiction,” Joan argues, her voice getting louder than she intends.

Ms. Hudson nods, unmoved. “Yes, that one was truly unfortunate. You did a good job of kicking him to the curb. Should try to see if you can get him fired, while you’re at it, since he clearly doesn’t know anything about PTSD. But the first – Sherlock says you fired her because her therapy techniques were out-of-date? What was she doing? Reading your tea leaves?”

“No,” Joan says, aware that she sounds like she’s pouting.

“Then…?”

“She uses CBT,” she confesses, and preemptively winces, waiting for the reaction.

“CBT? As in, cognitive behavioral therapies? As in, just about the most common therapy technique there is?”

“I didn’t think CBT would be really effective, given…” Joan waves her hand in front of her, trying to encompass the past year of her life in a gesture.

“Because you clearly spent a lot of time working on it before you fired her,” Ms. Hudson says flatly, but continues on before Joan can interject. “What about the therapist you saw when you first started working with Sherlock? He mentioned there was a woman you used to see.”

Joan scowls. “She’s fine, I guess. But she didn’t think I should become a consulting detective, and I feel like if I go to her and tell her about everything that’s happened, she’ll just say that she told me so.”

Ms. Hudson nods and stands up. “I see,” she says, and walks across the room to her purse, starting to rummage through it. She pulls something out and then walks over to the sofa, sitting down next to Joan and taking her hand.

Joan doesn’t flinch. She considers it an improvement. She’s getting something out of her failed therapy sessions, anyway, which gives her some small hopes.

Ms. Hudson stares at her for a moment, her eyes searching Joan’s, and finally she nods. “I know what you need.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You do?” she asks, doubtful. _She_ doesn’t even know what she needs. Not yet. She’s trying to trust that the answer will come to her at some point, so she can get better.

Ms. Hudson nods again. “I do. You need a therapist who won’t put up with your bullshit.”

Joan blinks, startled, her breath catching momentarily in her chest. “My what?”

“You and Sherlock,” Ms. Hudson says, laughing and shaking her head. “You do things differently, but you’re more alike than you’d like to admit. Stubborn as hell, for one. Here,” she says, handing Joan a card. “That’s my therapist’s information. Did a world of good for me, when I finally was ready to deal with the mess I’d made my life. Might be able to help you too.” 

Ms. Hudson pats Joan’s hand, squeezing it slightly before she stands up and goes back to her purse, slinging it over her shoulder. She turns and points a finger at Joan. “When you’re ready, though. Please don’t scare off my shrink. I like them.”

Joan looks back at the card. The name “Eugenia Ronder” is written in simple block letters. “They’re good?” she asks Ms. Hudson as she starts to leave, catching her careful use of ‘they’ as a pronoun.

Ms. Hudson pauses, her hand on the doorknob. “If you’re ready to get better? Then yes. They’re the best.”

She considers the card for a long time. Then she picks up the phone.

******  
“Does all of this,” Joan says, waving her chopsticks at the room as a whole, “frustrate you?”

Sherlock pauses, his chopsticks halfway to his mouth, which is open. He deliberately closes his mouth and then says, “Does what frustrate me?”

“This,” she says. “The... the therapists in the brownstone, the nightmares, the rearranging your life around the fact that I won’t leave? The fact that I won’t let you touch me still, after four months? That I still can’t really touch you?”

Sherlock snorts, putting his Chinese food down. “Because I was such a hug machine before, Watson,” he says, the words _hug machine_ pronounced crisply and with all the sarcasm they deserve.

She rolls her eyes. “You know what I mean, Sherlock.”

He adjusts his hold on his chopsticks and goes back to his food. “No, this does not frustrate me.”

Joan frowns, sitting upright on the sofa, pulling her feet from next to his thigh where she’d carefully arranged them so they didn’t touch him. “How?” she asks, or demands. She’s frustrated with herself; exhausted, really. More exhausted than she’d been in a year of running. She’d always assumed bringing down Moriarty would be the hard part. She hadn’t considered that the recovery would be worse.

“Because these things take time,” he says simply, putting a piece of Peking duck in his mouth and chewing. He taps his chopsticks against the edge of his plate, hums, and then says, “And I trust that you will get better. After all, I did.”

She sighs and picks at her chow mein. “That was different.”

He shifts, turning slightly towards her and giving her a look. “Of course it was. I’m not saying it wasn’t. I’m just saying, I found myself at the very bottom of a hole, and I managed to crawl my way back up, partially thanks to you. And so, I am here to do the same for you. For however long it takes.”

She doesn’t say anything after that.

There isn’t really anything to say, after all.

******  
Her therapist, Dr. Ronder, is good. Seven twice-weekly sessions with them, and Joan lets her hand brush Sherlock’s when handing him a bowl to put away from the dishwasher. Eight sessions in and she stops checking her room for bugs every night.

(She still does it at least once a week, but it’s an improvement, and she’ll take it.)

Fourteen sessions and she stands in the open doorway of the brownstone, watching the cars go by.

Ms. Hudson was right. She needed someone that wouldn’t put up with her lies, her stubbornness, her silences. She needed someone who wouldn’t coddle her or give her platitudes. Dr. Ronder is tough on her, but compassionate, and they keep encouraging Joan to be compassionate with herself.

“Give yourself time,” they keep saying.

She’s trying. 

She’s _trying_.

******  
When she wakes up in the middle of the night, a scream that she can taste resting at the back of her throat, Sherlock is already there, sitting across from her bed on a chair where she can clearly see him, waiting.

The first time he’d appeared in her room after a nightmare, she’d thrown her clock at him before she could stop herself and armed herself with her lamp, ready to take out Moriarty’s agent without thinking about it. Since then, Sherlock has made a point of ensuring that he doesn’t startle her fresh out of a nightmare.

She licks her lips, tasting the salt of sweat on her upper lip. She feels cold, despite the sweat. Joan takes a deep breath, wiping her hair away from her face, and looks at her knees. “Was it bad?” she asks, voice low.

“In the range of your epic nightmares, I would rate that one a six. Not your best work, perhaps, but not unimpressive,” Sherlock pronounces thoughtfully.

She nods, and closes her eyes.

They sit in silence until Sherlock says, “Would you like to talk about it?” Joan opens her eyes and looks at him, raising an eyebrow. He shrugs one shoulder, squirming slightly under her gaze. “Dr. Ronder… they suggested that, perhaps, I should ensure that you have a space in which to discuss what happened to you, if you wish to share. That perhaps things might… ease… between us if I took more of a participatory approach towards your recovery.”

Joan can’t help it. She snorts.

It’s Sherlock’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Why is that funny?’ he asks.

“I think that is probably the stupidest thing Dr. Ronder has suggested yet, and they are not generally a stupid person,” she says bluntly. She wipes some more of her hair away from her face, taking the opportunity to wipe some of the sweat away. 

“Why?” Sherlock asks again, shifting in the chair. It creaks under his weight, sounding loud in the relative silence of the room.

She sighs. “Sherlock… us _talking_ is not going to fix me.”

“I – I never said fix. I would also like to point out that, when we met, _you_ were the one who encouraged me to _share_ , to tell you about London and Irene and everything that broke me in the first place.”

“That was different,” she says, pulling her covers closer to her chest. Her heart is thudding, and it isn’t related to her nightmare, which she’s already forgotten. She wants Sherlock to leave but she can’t dredge up the words to send him away.

Sherlock’s hands flex on his knees, but he remains motionless otherwise. “How is it different? I recognize, of course, that our situations are different,” he says hurriedly, “and that what happened to me, I did to myself, whereas what happened to you was done _to_ you, and-”

Joan laughs and, before she can stop herself, blurts, “What happened to me _was_ my fault.”

Sherlock freezes. She thought he was motionless before, but now he’s a block of granite. “What do you mean,” he says quietly, “that this is your fault?”

She rubs her face, hard, and then kicks her covers off. “I’m not feeling very tired right now. I think I’ll make myself some tea. I’ll see you in the morning, Sherlock,” she says in a rush, standing and walking quickly out of her room. She’s halfway down the stairs when Sherlock catches up.

“Watson, wait.”

“No,” she says, and keeps walking, speeding up her steps. She hears Sherlock move faster behind her, and when she reaches the bottom of the stairs he must jump off the last few, because she hears a thud and then he’s in front of her, hands floating on either side of her shoulders, close but not touching. His face is intense, eyes boring into hers. 

“What do you mean, what happened to you was your fault?” he asks again.

She wants to shove past him, but she’d have to touch his hands to do so. Joan knows if she told him to move, he would, but it would break him a little. It would break her, too, she thinks. She wants to tell him, the thoughts she’s been having when she’s been pretending to read. She wants to tell him what she was thinking while trying to sleep in a strange bed in a strange country. She wants to tell him everything, because on some level she knows that Dr. Ronder is right. She needs to talk about what happened, and she needs to talk to Sherlock about it in particular. She did what she did, in part, to protect him. She forced herself to never think about him, to erase him from even her private thoughts, so desperately did she want to protect him.

He’s her closest friend, and she wants to tell him everything, but she can’t. 

Not yet.

But she can tell him this.

She inhales sharply and looks him directly in the eye, her chin tipped up even as his automatically tips down to accommodate her shorter height. “It is my fault that I was taken by Moriarty, and it’s my fault that it took as long as it did to bring her down. I am the one who agreed to play Go with her, and I became obsessed. She got to me, and I let her, which is how she got to me, how she managed to take me. And then, when I finally figured out that I could turn Moran against her, I wasn’t smart enough, I wasn’t good enough, to do it quickly. I couldn’t be _you_ , Sherlock.”

He takes a step back, granting her space. Joan slides by him, going to sit on the sofa by the stairs, her chest loosening. It’s a relief, in so many ways, to say it.

In so many others, it hurts.

After a moment, Sherlock comes and sits down next to her. She draws her legs up, folding them and using her knees to protect her space.

“I think the situation needed a Joan Watson, not a Sherlock Holmes,” says Sherlock, not looking at her.

She smiles, but there is no mirth behind it. “Oh?”

He nods. “I would have… not succeeded, in your place. I would have struggled. And, ultimately, I believe I would have failed.”

“Sherlock-”

“Watson. I have… years of experience, in the science of observation and deduction, many more years than you, which explains why I can reach conclusions faster than you, in some instances. That is time, and hard work, and focus. You are much closer to me in that regard than you give yourself credit for. But you…” He blows out a breath, still looking into the middle distance. “You have a resilience that I do not.” He hits the ‘t’ hard, a verbal tic that she realizes abruptly that she’s missed.

“It wasn’t resilience,” she says feebly.

He tips his head to the side, looking at her from the side, his mouth quirking into a small smile. “It was. A year of hardship, and you didn’t break. I couldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have done it. I would have told Moriarty to bring me drugs and allowed myself to descend into a haze. That’s how I would have escaped. Not through effort. Through giving up.”

“But-”

“And I would never have thought of trying to convince Moran to work with me. Not a people person, Watson. Never have been.” He says it with a bit of a laugh in his voice, placing his hands palm up on his thighs. “In fact, I think Moran and I would have been driven to do violence against one another. Arsenal fan, you know.”

Joan laughs. It’s a weak laugh, but it’s real. Maybe one of her first real laughs since she returned home.

“I would have failed, Watson. I would have died. You did not. The situation needed a Joan Watson, not a Sherlock Holmes,” repeats Sherlock. “And, to your first point: nothing that happened was your fault.”

“But-” she tries again, but Sherlock quickly raises a finger in the air, cutting her off.

“You didn’t choose anything that happened. You made the best choices you could under the circumstances, and Moriarty was always in control of those circumstances.”

“I could have walked away,” Joan whispers. “I could have walked away, never played Go with her, and this would all be different now.”

He hums. “Would it?”

She gives him a look. “Of course it would.”

“Because from where I sit, I think Moriarty still would have kidnapped you. For different reasons, perhaps, but she still would have taken you. Or maybe just killed you. I can’t say for sure. But I know information of value was obtained from your sessions with her. You learned how she thought. How she behaved. You learned about her network, knowledge which, if I’m not mistaken, assisted you as you pulled the net down around her.”

It’s a way of thinking about the situation that isn’t new to her. She’s thought it herself, many times. She just can’t let herself believe it. It would give her a way out. 

It would let her forgive herself.

“Sherlock,” she sighs, looking down at her lap.

“I – I can’t make you believe it. I suspect it will be a very long time before you can let yourself believe it. And until you’re willing to, I’ll keep saying it.” He shifts on the sofa, turning partially to look at her. His face is soft, kind. “It wasn’t your fault, Joan.”

It’s the first time anyone has said it out loud, the first time she realizes she needs to hear it said, and it makes the core of her shake. Her hand twitches, and his hand reaches out, fingertips stopping just above the back of her hand.

“It _wasn’t _your fault. None of it. And I hope that, someday, you can believe that.”__

__Joan looks at him for a long time, and Sherlock doesn’t blink, eyes flicking across her face. Her chest aches, and her face feels strangely warm. It takes her a few minutes to realize: she’s crying._ _

__She reaches up and touches her cheek with a shaking hand. The warmth on her face is from her tears. She’s crying. She’s _finally_ crying. It’s been almost a year since she last cried, and the pain, the fear, the feeling of being too little and not enough – none of those made her cry. Winning her freedom, that didn’t make her cry. It took this. Of all things, it took this._ _

__She closes her eyes, relishing the sensation of tears rolling down her face. It hurts, so much, but she welcomes it anyway._ _

__“Okay,” she croaks. “Okay.”_ _

__Then, carefully, deliberately, she takes Sherlock’s hand._ _

__******  
It is a Tuesday._ _

__Joan is sitting on her bed – her _real_ bed, in her real bedroom, and she only gets nervous occasionally, now. She’s painting her toenails purple; they’ve been purple for months now, but she paints them again every week, refreshing the color and reminding herself: she won. She won, Moriarty lost, and she’s home now. Sometimes, on good days, she reminds herself that nothing that happened was her fault. She still can’t convince herself to leave the brownstone, but sometimes she can believe that what happened was not her fault._ _

__It is a Tuesday, Joan is sitting on her bed painting her toenails purple, and her phone rings. She picks it up and cradles it between her shoulder and her cheek. “Hello?”_ _

__“Joan, hey,” Marcus says. “Do you got a minute?”_ _

__“I always have a minute for you, Marcus,” she says, smiling. She puts the wand back in the nail polish, twisting it shut. “What’s up?”_ _

__“Well, it’s kinda weird… the good kind, for once. A girl just got brought into the precinct – maybe nine-years-old? Ten? She’s been living on the streets for the past couple of months. Says her name is Kayden Fuller.”_ _

__Joan’s hand tightens on the nail polish. She thinks her grip might be tight enough to break it. “Kayden Fuller?”_ _

__“You remember her, right? She’s-”_ _

__“Moriarty’s daughter. Yeah, I remember her. What… where did she come from? What is she saying?”_ _

__She can faintly hear the creak of Marcus’ office chair, and she imagines him leaning back. “Says that a few months ago, a man showed up at her foster family’s house, and-”_ _

__“Foster family?” Joan interrupts, incredulous. She stands, as if on autopilot, and wanders out of her bedroom, heading towards the television room. “Is that what she was told, when Moriarty sent her away?”_ _

__“Apparently they said both of her parents were dead, actually, which is why she was rehomed.” She inhales sharply, and Marcus sighs. “Yeah, I know. Anyway, this guy shows up at her foster family’s house and explains that he’s her biological father, her _real_ father, and he’s come to take her home. We have some people looking for the foster parents… Kayden says they gave her to her dad, but you and I both know anyone Moriarty put the kid with wouldn’t just let her go.”_ _

__Dead, probably, Joan thinks. She can still picture the wild light in Norton’s eyes. “What happened then? Where is Norton now?”_ _

__“Norton?” Marcus asks._ _

__She pauses. She’s gotten better at telling people about her time on the run, but she hasn’t told anyone about Norton. She’s been too ashamed – she should have been looking for him the moment she was home, hunting him and trying to bring Kayden home like she’d always wanted. Like she’d set out to do, at the very beginning. But she couldn’t, and it’s eaten her alive, so she’s kept that shame to herself._ _

__“He wasn’t lying,” Joan says finally. “That man was Kayden’s biological father. Moriarty’s… lover, I guess.”_ _

__“Oh. Wow. Uh…” Marcus blows out a long breath, static erupting in her ear momentarily. “Okay, kind of hard to really picture that, but okay. Anyway, Kayden said she was with him for maybe a week, and then he just – ditched her. They were watching the TV, the news, and then he just walked out. She’s been on her own ever since.”_ _

__Joan licks her lips, walking into the television room and over to the closet. She opens it and pulls out a trunk. She doesn’t know where the key is anymore, but thankfully she’s become quite good at picking locks. “Is she okay?”_ _

__Marcus sighs again. “She’s good for a kidnap victim. Good for living on her own the past few months. Quiet, maybe, but unharmed. She’s playing with Legos now. Asking for her mom, now that she knows her mom is alive.”_ _

__She gets the trunk open and pulls out the Fuller file, on the very top of the cold cases, and flips it open. There is a photo of Kayden at the front of the folder. Small and smiling, held in the arms of parents who loved her. “You’ve contacted Mrs. Fuller?”_ _

__“She’s on her way. Joan, any idea what happened here? Why, after all this time, is Kayden Fuller sitting in our precinct?”_ _

__“I can’t say for sure, but I think Norton wanted her to use against Moriarty,” Joan says, touching the photo of Kayden. She looks so young, and so carefree. “I think he wanted to force Moriarty to play happy families with him, and he needed Kayden in order to do that, in order to get Moriarty’s attention again. And when he found out Moriarty was dead…”_ _

__“He abandoned her.”_ _

__“Norton never cared about Kayden,” Joan explains. “Not as a person. She was only ever a tool to him.”_ _

__She looks at the photo for a long time, listening to Marcus breathe and take in what she just said on the other end of the line._ _

__“Do you want to see her?” Marcus says finally._ _

__A few minutes later, Joan walks down the stairs. She feels light, clutching the file in her hands. Sherlock looks up when she walks into the lock room, his mouth full of nails, a hammer in one hand and a taxidermied possum in the other. He spits out the nails when she flops the file on top of the table, frowning. “Kayden Fuller,” he says._ _

__“She’s going home,” she replies, unable to hold back the grin. “Norton – her biological father – he abandoned her. With Moriarty gone… he couldn’t have his happy ending. She’s going _home_ , Sherlock. She’s going back to the people who love her.”_ _

__She can’t stop smiling. Sherlock tilts his head, studying her, and she knows he has questions. He doesn’t know about Norton any more than Marcus does. She’s ready, now, to tell him._ _

__But he doesn’t ask._ _

__“What would you like to do?” he asks instead._ _

__Joan grins even wider. Kayden Fuller will be at the precinct for a while longer. Her mother should be there in just a few minutes, but there will be red tape to clear, processing to finish. It will probably be at least another hour or two before they take pity on the family and let them go home, to finish everything when they’re feeling better, more ready. They will be there for at least another hour or two._ _

__She smiles, and she takes a breath, and says, “I’m going to the precinct. Would you like to come?”_ _

__He doesn’t even hesitate, standing in one fluid motion and offering his arm. “Of course.”_ _

__When Joan opens the door, it feels like she’s breathing for the first time in almost a year. She doesn’t even remember to feel afraid, too excited to find out if it’s real, if it’s true. If Kayden Fuller is really home. If her obsession, her mission, is finally done._ _

__Joan isn’t healed. That, she knows, will take time. It has taken her a while to accept that, but she knows it to be true. She has days where she can’t get out of bed; days where she rips apart her bedroom, scared that the listening devices are back and that she’s hallucinated being safe, being home. She has days where she won’t look at Sherlock, too worried that a sniper will take him out, and other days where she’s so angry at him for not being a little taller, a little wider, with a rougher accent. She has days where she can laugh easily with Alfredo and Ms. Hudson and her mom, and other days where she remembers that her existence is a danger to them, and even more days where she remembers how hard they worked to keep her alive and feels humbled. Most days she can use a spatula without thought, but other days she sees one and cries. She cries now, sometimes for hours at a time, scared that she’ll never stop, but she prefers it over the numbness that gripped her for over a year._ _

__It will take time. But she has time._ _

__It wasn’t her fault._ _

__Joan steps outside._ _

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a line adapted from a poem by John Glenday called “The River”.


End file.
